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RR 2014/315 Biographical Dictionary Eric Tentarelli S9.com 1997- URL: www.s9.com Last visited July 2014 Gratis
Keywords Biography, Electronic media. Directories
Review DOI 10.1108/RR-07-2014-0190
The Biographical Dictionary advertises itself as "a Wikipedia type system". While this database was new to me, according to the site it has been online since 1997, and in an earlier review in Electronic Services Review, it is dated even further back to 1992 (Nesbeitt, 1998). Whether begun in 1997 or 1992, in online terms, the Biographical Dictionary has been in existence for a very long time: by comparison, Wikipedia was started in 2004. The Biographical Dictionary (BD) provides practically no information about itself. So this review is based mostly on my own observations. I will also compare the site to other references sources like Wikipedia, Merriam-Webster's Biographical Dictionary and World Book Online, gauging the quality of the site's content, ease of use and overall effectiveness.
There is no concrete information regarding the scope of the site's contents. Junion-Metz (1998, p. 125) estimated the number of entries in the Biographical Dictionary at "more than 25,000". I don't know where she got this number, but I contacted the Biographical Dictionary website to find out if this estimate had changed at all since 1998. I never heard back.
The majority of the entries provide birth dates, death dates and an image of the subject along with a timeline. Only 1 of the roughly 10 to 15 entries that I examined provided any kind of overview of the subject's life, making it difficult to quickly understand why the person was significant. There was also very limited metadata provided for most entries. These data consisted of linked subject terms of "nationality"...