Traditionally, Reference Works in Printed Book Format Have Often Had Surprisingly Little

WISER21 Jan. 2008

Using Oxford DNB

Mark Curthoys

Traditionally, reference works in printed book format have often had surprisingly little introductory apparatus. Consider the original Dictionary of National Biography, on which the Oxford DNB is based. When it appeared in 1885, there was the title page, then a list of contributors’ names, and then straight in to page 1, with the article on Abbadie. No explanation of what the dictionary was – as the late Colin Matthew pointed out, there was no definition of what National meant – Abbadie himself was born in the Pyrenees. Nor was there any sort of explanation of how to use it. This was treated as self-evident – and the informality of the bibliographical citations reinforce the sense of a book produced for a world of readers with well-furnished personal libraries and an instinctive familiarity with their contents. So the 1885 article on Sir John Acland directs the reader to ‘Prince’s Worthies of Devon; Visitations of Devon and Somerset; and Boase’s ExeterCollege’. Such a bibliography is a lot easier to decipher in the age of electronic library catalogues – but in the days of print you had to recognize the book being referred to in order to stand a chance of consulting it.

The last of the original DNB’s 63 volumes, published in 1900, was accompanied by a preface, which gave a statistical overview of the content. But again, it didn’t attempt to guide readers in its use. When the whole dictionary was published in 22 thin-paper volumes in 1908, the statistical account was plumbed in as the introduction to volume I. The classic 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica was little different in this regard – having a brief historical introduction and list of contributors.

There was little, indeed, in the way of what we might call ‘peripherals’, though an early C20 advert for the DNB – ‘a magnificent Christmas or New Year’s gift’ – announced the availability of a space-saving revolving book stand, in well-seasoned oak, walnut, or mahogany.

Whilst its volumes might indeed rotate on their stand, the dictionary was in every other respect a fixed resource after 1908. It would have been hopelessly uneconomic to replace the metal plates from which reprints were made up to 1990s. As a result, no new information, or corrections could be added to the published articles. In 1918, for example, the librarian of Ipswich public library wrote to the dictionary’s editor, Sidney Lee, to point out that Elizabeth Fry’s birthplace was wrongly given. That correction had to remain on file until the twenty-first century: the correct information was published in the Oxford DNB in 2004.

The Oxford DNB was planned from the start as an electronic resource – one of the earliest – and possibly the first major reference work – to be planned from the outset as an electronic resource. In the early 1990s this mean cd-rom, which like the earlier printed books, was a fixed source, but which embodied the new possibility of searchability.

Searchability is the first of two functional aspects of the electronic dictionary which I want to demonstrate today.

When the dictionary was eventually published, however, online had come into being, and this raises the second theme that I’d like to consider, and that is the dictionary’s fluidity.

These two characteristics have, in turn, driven the growth of a great mass of introductory and explanatory material which has mushroomed on the dictionary site to assist readers – and I’d like to draw attention to this as opening up a range of possibilities that was beyond the scope of print publication. (Though I should add that the 60 volume print edition published in 2004 had an introduction, which included a guide to articles, and abbreviation lists.)

I’ll tackle fluidity of online first. We’re adding new lives – in updates three times a year. The 2004 version contained lives of people who died up to the end of the year 2000. Every January since, a tranche of post-200 deaths has been added: the Queen Mother, Roy Jenkins, Fred Dibnah, and so on.

There have always been tranches of additional lives of people who died before 2000, arranged mainly in thematic groupings, to help achieve consistency of selection and editing, as well as intellectual coherence. There’ve been additional lives of refugees and exiles from mainland Europe – the deposed king of Portugal who settled in Twickenham, a Czech battle of Britain ace, and so on – there’ve also been Commonwealth leaders, photographers, medieval bishops, and so on. Coming up are more gardeners – the doyens of snowdrops, daffodils and Michaelmas daisies – and policemen – the Surrey chief constable who invented speed traps – and so on. So the body of content is being gradually, and methodically, extended.

There are also adjustments to existing articles. Simple corrections or the addition of newly-discovered information – previously unknown dates of birth or death, or – more often - previously unknown spouses. This, in turn, derives from newly-available online resources . When the data for the 2004 version of the dictionary was locked down in 2002, the 1901 census online was a recent novelty, and the earlier censuses generally unavailable.

Another driver of this process is reader suggestion. The ‘contact us’ facility puts users in connection with compilers to a closer degree than was ever previously possible – there’s a steady flow of comment and often extremely valuable new data from readers around the world. We’ve developed protocols as to how to deal with this stream of information, either by referring to article authors or by verifying and editing in-house.

Those readers, in turn, are often alerted to ODNB by the Oxford Biographical Index – 56k free pages loaded on the web - whose creation has enabled searchers on google looking for a particular individual to be led to the ODNB entry on a particular subject – they then get information on how to access the article they’re interested in through libraries or individual subscriptions. Since the Oxford Biographical Index came on stream, there’s a demonstrable increase in traffic to the site.

So far, all this relates to individual lives, accessed through the quick search tool – which is a versatile mechanism which will deliver ‘known as’ names as well as formal titles. Searches on Queen Mum, queen Mother, Lady Di, Captain Cook, Dr Johnson or even Demon Barber will lead the reader to the relevant article. Likewise for variant spellings (Boadicea), which are continuously being added.

This is however simply doing what the reader of a well cross-referenced print volume would do, but more rapidly.

The other quick search tool searches on text. This adds a new dimension, cutting horizontally through the data as it were. We take it for granted, but it was quite a novelty in 2004 when reviewers had fun searching for people who didn’t ‘suffer fools gladly’ – and got 5 pages of hits. Users have rapidly latched onto its potential as a starting point for almost any type of research which involves a concept or idea – so you can search on Keynesian; or free trade; or anti-slavery; or chivalry; or Newtonian – and get pages of examples to follow up.

Here, readers are beginning to create their own datasets. But editorially, it soon became apparent that there were certain sets of lives which it would be time-saving for users if they could be accessed ready-made. For example the list of monarchs or prime ministers. If one doesn’t know their names, or the order in which they held office, how would you be able to read their articles consecutively? The traditional answer would have been to sit down with the Handbook of British Chronology at one side, and the set of DNB at the other. The ‘Themes’ page of the ODNB site includes a lot of newly-added material of this sort – under Reference Lists, exploiting the potential of hyperlinks.

These are formally-defined groups. There is another category of grouping which reflects the increasing interest in collective biography. These are embodied in the Reference Groups – which range from the Gunpowder Plotters, Pilgrim Fathers, and the Mutineers on the Bounty to the evangelical Clapham Sect or the Suez Group of MPs or the founders of the Labour Party. Readers are navigated round the personnel involved and are led to their individual entries.This is very much a continuing exercise: the next update will include Scott’s Antarctic Expedition; the think-tank Political and Economic Planning; the Mass-Observation social survey; and the various women’s suffrage organizations.

As I’ve mentioned, these are ready-made ‘sets’ of lives – these connections between people have been constructed authorially or editorially.

The search tools enable readers to create their own sub-sets of data and I’d like to turn to this, because the possibilities warrant being better known (the downside of the powerful quicksearch tools is that we’ve found many readers don’t go beyond them).

One can search the data for gender, chronology, place, occupation, religious affiliation and so on. (or who was buried in HolywellCemetery?). Wesleyan methodists in Yorkshire can be pinpointed, for example. I have used these facilities for a conference paper on gardening as an occupation, to find examples of gardeners in the dictionary, not only as subjects in their own right, but also through references to parents who were gardeners, or spouses, and so on. Or, while researching an incident in Oxford in 1871, attended by several thousand people, I used the dictionary to find who was resident in Oxford at the time, with view to finding those who kept diaries or wrote memoirs, which may give an account of the incident in question.

Such searching can also be applied to the ‘References’ section – what we think of ‘below the line’ apparatus in printed books. Occurrences of books cited in the lists of sources used can be located (and I should stress that these aren’t bibliographies for further reading – though they may function as that – but lists of materials actually used in writing the article).Or available archives of the subject. Or archives in a particular location (a trip to the Henry Huntington Library prompted such a preliminary search). A recent visit to the Millais exhibition prompted a search on known likenesses by him of people in ODNB.

Wealth at Death data has also interested researchers. You can do a search of who left under £50 – writers and artists figure prominently!

Further information on the search tools can be found in the ‘Learning Resources’ pages of the online dictionary. In particular, the ‘Higher Education and University’ pages contain guides to using the online dictionary, including the downloadable ‘Oxford DNB search guide’.