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Review from: Online, January/February
2006
Review from: Choice, February 2006
Review from: Library Journal, January 2006
Review from: Online January/February
2006
At the end of September, I was heartened
to read a mass e-mail that offered free access to BRD Retrospective:
1905-1982 until the end of October. It was perfectly designed; it
stood out without being insolent; it had enough information to get the
recipients’ attention; it had quick links for additional information
about the source journals covered and the most prominent reviewers,
including Saul bellow, Virginia Woolf, or Kurt Vonnegut: and it had a
simple signup procedure.
Not surprisingly, the claims of H.W.
Wilson were also true. Indeed, there are 300,000 books covered (OK,
299,778 as of Oct. 1, 2005) spanning almost 80 years, and indeed,
"virtually every book has at least one substantial review excerpt" my
test showed 298,917 (99.7 percent). The list of sources is very
impressive, ranging from the best newspapers and magazines to the best
reviews-only journals, such as Choice, Horn Book, and Booklist.
The only point for which the publisher
seems to "glid the lily" is the sample list of reviewers, which includes
William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, and Leonard Bernstein, who have only
one or two reviews apiece. One might, however, consider the trade-off of
quantity and quality. Faulkner is as good in his review as in his
novels.
It would be useful to offer searching by
review source in a field-Specific index. Searching by such source titles
as Choice, Booklist, and History in the ALL index is inefficient, as it
yields too many records when these words are not the journal names. You
can avoid this by using the ISSN of the review source (0009-4978 for
Choice), but it is not an obvious step. I would love to see an unusual
sort feature, a list by decreasing number of reviews, as the more
sources reviewed the book, the more likely it is that the book is a
worthy one. It would allow finding the most reviewed books published in
the 1970s, or written by Anna Quindlen, or about the chosen subject. You
can get extremely excited about this database.
Review from: Choice, February 2006
This database offers a user-friendly interface for
searching 1.5 million reviews of 300,000 books that appeared 1905-82.
Complete bibliographic information is provided for abstracts and
substantive contemporary reviews, with meaningful excerpts from one or
more. For example, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) had 16
reviews, all but one with excerpts. Users can employ a basic search option
or an advanced search feature that provides 18 field options, ranging from
keyword, subject, or title to those of greater interest to librarians,
e.g., Dewey Decimal, reviewer, or ISBN. Users may then sort results by one
of 23 fields such as relevance or date or those of internal interest
(e.g., LC control number). Subject heading searching may be a useful tool
for collection development. Since student assignments frequently make use
of review material, this electronic tool will enable students to become
acquainted with the impressions that a title made on its readers when
published. The only limitation is, of course, that the database is drawn
from titles reviewed in the mainstream press. Thus, science titles, for
example, are not strongly represented. An added plus is libraries’ ability
to link OPAC holdings to the database.
Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-level undergraduates;
general readers.
Review from: Library Journal, January 2006
A Bibliophile's Heaven by Cheryl LaGuardia
Covering nearly 80 years, Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1905-1982
assesses 300,000 books in 1.5 million reviews. It includes review excerpts
(one or more for each book) from more than 500 English-language
publications, ranging from American Sociological Review to the Chicago Sun
Times, Library Journal, National Review, Political Science Quarterly, Yale
Law Review, and many more (the full list is available online).
Interestingly, Wilson's press release notes that switching to this file
can save your library more than 14 feet of shelf space occupied by the 78
printed annual volumes.
HOW DOES IT WORK?
The WilsonWeb search interface works particularly well with this file.
You can search by Keyword, Subject, Title, Personal Author, Review Author,
ISBN, Publisher, Publication Year, and nine other access points. You can
limit searches by date or to full text, peer reviewed, or PDF. You can
even specify a document type or physical description.
CAN YOU AND YOUR PATRONS USE IT?
This file poses a clear and present danger to bibliophiles: they will
most certainly spend many happy and productive hours in there before
coming up for air. This can start with an innocent ready-reference search
for, say, Norman Mailer. What could be a more
workmanlike occupation? When I Advanced Searched for Mailer as a Personal
Author, I found 16 reviews of The Naked and the Dead from 1948. The 11
excerpts included John Farrelly's article in The New Republic ("It is like
a sheaf of posthumous letters home, which we read as intruders of
privacy.... This doesn't mean to deny Mailer his achievement. If he has a
taste for transcribing banalities, he also has a talent for it.") and
Richard Match's article in the New York Herald Tribune ("Norman Mailer has
an uncanny phonographic ear for the argot of efficient obscenity that
served as a medium of communication in the Army of the United States").
Forty-five minutes later (after reading each excerpt and following web
links to other sources), I searched for Mailer as Review Author to find
this excerpt of his 1963 review of Victor Lasky's J.F.K: The Man and the
Myth: "[It] is an irritating, frustrating, and finally disappointing book
because it offered the promise of becoming a first-rate job, and was
spoiled-this spoilation being a first-rate loss-by Lasky's incapacity to
entertain a poetic concept of his subject."
That's how every search worked. This beguiling file located so many
well-loved subjects and so much wonderful prose-and did so easily. It was
child's play to locate 599 titles published by Victor Gollancz from 1926
to 1981 and then revise the search (looking for "mystery" in the abstract)
to pull up contemporary reviews of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and Dorothy
L. Sayers's Have His Carcase.
HOW GOOD IS IT?
It is a giant ten. I love this file and so will researchers.
THE BOTTOM LINE
This file is an essential acquisition for every public, academic, and
research library.
Reviewer: Cheryl LaGuardia is the Head of Instructional Services,
Harvard College Library, and author of Becoming a Library Teacher
(Neal-Schuman, 2000). Readers and producers can contact her at
claguard@fas.harvard.eduAuthor
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