eReviews: Credo Topic Pages
Oct 1, 2010Credo Topic Pages
Credo Reference
http://corp.credoreference.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=259&Itemid=178
CONTENT Credo Topic Pages are designed to act as starting points for research, providing context and vocabulary for topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. They present subject materials (articles, books, images, news, and videos) from a variety of sources (as determined by each library). There are currently over 10,000 topic pages available.
Topic Pages appear as part of the Credo Reference system, so first let me describe where a user begins. The opening Credo page has the Credo logo at screen left, with a placeholder for your institution's logo at screen top, right. Below the logo holder is a toolbar with placeholder links to "Your library website," "EasyBib.com," "Your Library Blog," and "Ask-A-Librarian." Below that is another toolbar with buttons for Search, Find a Book, Advanced Search, Concept Map, Saved Results, Gadgets, and Help.
Beneath the toolbars is a single search box with tabs for Search, Image Search, and Concept Map. Below the search box is a section showing a carousel display of Featured Content images, with a column at right headed "Use Credo Reference to find:", followed by links to Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Biographies, Quotations, Bilingual Dictionaries, Crossword Solver, and Measurement Conversions. At bottom are toggles that set the interface language to English, Spanish, French, Polish, Chinese, and Urdu.
To locate a Topic Page, one enters a term into the search box, and if a Topic Page is available, it appears at the top of the search results. Search results are grouped into two sections: Topic Pages and Reference Entries.
USABILITY I should note here that for this review, I was searching 3,286,547 full-text entries in 505 reference books in Credo Reference. My first search in the system was for Jane Austen, for which I got a link to a Topic Page along with 867 results in All Subjects. The Topic Page began with two quotations about Austen: "That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful thing I ever met with," Sir Walter Scott, Journals, March 14, 1826; and "More can be learnt from Miss Austen about the nature of the novel than from almost any other writer," Walter Allen, The English Novel, 1954. It also contained a link to "Read Complete Article"; the source of the article (The Penguin Biographical Dictionary of Women, Market House Books Ltd., 1998); the citation for the article (available in APA, Chicago, Harvard, or MLA citation styles); a "definition" for Austen from Collins English Dictionary with links to more dictionary type entries within Credo (including the Bloomsbury Biographical Dictionary of Quotations, theBloomsbury Dictionary of English Literature, and the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English); links to related topics (Burney, Fanny and Richardson, Samuel); references to handbooks and other reference works; journal articles (from OmniFile Full Text Mega); books (an alphabetical listing from the Library of Congress catalog); Images (from a variety of encyclopedia sources and Wikimedia Commons); news (from BBC and Yahoo News); EngLits Summaries from ebrary; links into Google Book editions of Persuasion, Pride and Prejudice, and Emma; and several videos from YouTube.
Next I did a search for Pluto, for which I got a Topic Page plus 1007 results in All Subjects. Going into the Topic Page, I found an article from the Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide (Abington: Helicon, 2009), along with images, citation, encyclopedia entries...and this is where it got interesting. I turned up results from mythological resources (for the Roman god Pluto) as well as for the dwarf planet. I looked through the other sections of this Topic Page and discovered a news article from BBC News about a "Teenage boy injured during attack" in Pluto Close (Leicester, UK), along with three YouTube videos of Pluto the cartoon dog. "Books" from the Library of Congress included the sound recording of "Baby's Day," which "Presents a fictional account of a typical day in the lives of baby Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Goofy, and Donald," plus a cartoon called The Beach Party featuring Mickey, Minnie, Pluto, Clarabelle Cow, and Horace Horsecollar. This is immediately followed by a 1773 libretto titled Ceres: ein musikalisches Vorspiel. So some material is jumbled together here.
PRICING Credo content and free web resources in Credo Topic Pages are available free of charge as part of a Credo Reference subscription (if your subscription is to fewer than five books, Topic Pages do not appear in search results). For the first year after the release of Credo Topic Pages, links to library resources such as EBSCO files, Encyclopedia Britannica, and JSTOR are available free of charge. After the first year, a maintenance fee of 20 percent of your subscription will be charged (with a minimum of $750) for configuring and maintaining library resources on Topic Pages. Consortia discounts are available. Note that library resources on Topic Pages (and their maintenance fee) are optional. BOTTOM LINE Some of the content here is excellent, some of it is what you'd get from a Google search, and some of it can be a bit misleading because the system's lack of sufficient disambiguation gives you Topic Pages that embrace a bevy of subjects, which could confuse newbie researchers.
Because there is good material here and because the Pages do pull many formats and materials together, I give Credo Topic Pages an overall eight in their present incarnations. Libraries should take a good look at Topic Pages before adding the maintenance fee to a subscription, although it's the library-resource content that is likely to be the most valuable here.
| Author Information |
| Cheryl LaGuardia is the Research Librarian for the Widener Library at Harvard University and author of Becoming a Library Teacher (Neal-Schuman, 2000). Readers and producers can contact her at claguard@fas.harvard.edu |
