This is a review that I worked on for a class last summer. I played with it a bit more after this and sent it out to get published. The journal that I sent it to already had a review in the pipe for this site but they offered me a few other resources to write about. This has been languishing on my hard drive since.
Review Subject: Biographical
Dictionary
Publisher Name: S9.com
Internet URL: http://www.s9.com
Last Visited: July
5, 2014
Price: Free
Reviewer: Edward
Anthony Koltonski
Reviewer Affiliation: Kent
State University School of Library and Information Science
References:
Hades.
(2008, August 25). Nikola Tesla: high voltage genius [Web log post]. Retrieved
from http://apolloshouseofhades.blogspot.com/2008/08/high-voltage-genius-of-note-nikola.html
Nikola
Tesla: 2007 schools Wikipedia selection entry. Retrieved from
Nikola
Tesla II. (2014). the Biography.com website. Retrieved 02:04, Jul 05, 2014,
from http://www.biography.com/people/nikola-tesla-9504443.
Nikola
Tesla III. (July 2014). Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_tesla
Biographical resources hold an important
place in reference collections as they are likely to be used by all levels of
users. General users may become interested in discovering more about a person
that they heard about on the radio or who stars in their favorite movie.
Students commonly go to biographies for writing papers. Serious researchers and
academics turn to biographies to familiarize themselves with a new topic or to
add content and scope to their writing. Given its importance to so many users,
it is no surprise there are so many sources for biographical information.
This is a free, web-based service that
claims to model itself on Wikipedia. It has an extremely broad focus with
entries including Charlemagne, Jesus Christ, Mike Meyers, and Dick Dale. The
home page contains a brief statement of purpose, featured biographies, and a search
field. There are also navigation tabs provided for home, browse, search, and
challenge (a biography quiz). The browse feature allows users to peruse entries
by first letter, category, and nationality. Browsing by category provides an
extensive list of occupations with larger sets, such as Musicians and Writers,
divided into subcategories. Both the category and nationality browsing option
provides the total number of entries in each heading. Browsing by letter lists
entries alphabetically by their last name along with the current revision date
for each entry. The search tab provides the same quick search as the home page.
There is also an option for advanced searching with fields that include:
person’s name, keyword, and drop-down fields for dates of birth and death.
Individual entries, like the homepage, are
free of clutter. The page header includes the subject name and known
derivatives, a single image, birth and death dates, nationality, categories, a user
rating field, and a status bar indicating whether the entry is locked or
editable. The site’s Terms and Conditions page states that the site can lock or
remove entries without cause. The rest of the biography is formatted as a list
of, usually sequential dates with a short (typically 1-3 sentences) statement.
Exceptions to this format can be found. For example, the biography for American
politician James Richard Perry (Rick Perry) conforms to the format in the header
but the main entry drops the timeline format for a narrative. This entry has
been locked and it is possible that the site is planning to bring this into
line with the rest of its entries. Individual entries provide no citation
which, as discussed later, is problematic.
The
“Wikipedia type system” this services aspires to means “everyone can edit
biographies or even create their own.” Despite several attempts, every effort
to register with the service to see how this worked ended with a server-side error.
Entries provide no information about who created or edited them other than an
update notice at the bottom of the page. The fact that it is impossible to
attribute the entries to anyone is further exacerbated by suggestions of
plagiarism. For example, the site’s entry for Nikola Tesla appears to be copied
from other sources. Three of the four sentences of the 1856 entry are almost
identical to sentences from the 2007 Wikipedia Selection from Schools DVD
(Nikola Tesla, 2007): the only differences are the removal of inline citation
and that the Biographical Dictionary reports Tesla’s mother’s name as “uka
Mandi,” where Wikipedia (Nikola Tesla III) and other reputable sources (Nikola
Tesla II) report her name as Đuka Mandić.
This Google search uncovered another disturbing discovery. The timeline
format on Tesla’s entry on Biographical Dictionary had a unique discrepancy.
The final few entries progressed as follows: 1915, 1917, 1916, 1943. A blog
post (Hades) was discovered that is identical to the main section of the Tesla
entry on Biographical Dictionary (comparisons made at www.text-compare.com).
The blog post was created on August 25, 2008 while the last date given for the
Tesla entry was December 6, 2013. In other words, directing a user to this
entry is equivocal to sending them to a blog.
It is
impossible to know who is responsible. There is, unlike Wikipedia, no
discoverable log of the edits made to this page. Maybe registered users have
access to such information but, as mention above, it was impossible to register.
Further, there is little information about the publisher S9.com. No people are
attributed in their mission statement, their contact page, or through Internet
search tools such as WHOIS. This casts serious questions about the authority of
this service.
There is
also little enforcement of the site’s policies. The Terms and Conditions page
states that the site “is not a venue for advertisements in any way,” but at
least three biographies on the main page, two of which are labeled “featured,” provide
links to their companies or, in one case, a commercial on YouTube.
Libraries
and information centers of all stripes have been experiencing a crisis of
funding for some time now. This has many librarians looking to free options to bolster
their licensed tools and provide their users with access to the information
that they need. Free tools also have the added benefit of allowing users to
access these services from anywhere. A good free service is a great boon to
librarians and users alike. This service is, unfortunately, a boon to neither. The
site is easy to navigate; however, Biographical Dictionary is full of spelling
and grammar mistakes, questionable information, and inconsistent policy
practices. I cannot foresee an instance where a user should be directed to
Biographical Dictionary when more accurate and authoritative free options are
available at Wikipedia and Biography.com.
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