The New Grove Dictionary of Opera Online is one of a series of standard Grove reference works now available in electronic format; the Grove Dictionary of Art is currently available, and the much awaited New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.) is scheduled to appear in print and online in late 2000. The four‐volume print Dictionary of Opera has long been the essential encyclopedic guide to operas, opera technique, composers, and singers, so the appearance of a searchable electronic version of this reference staple will benefit all libraries. Nearly 11,000 articles are available, 60 of which are new to this version, and there are links to over 550 images and other resources from third‐party Web sites. All the prefatory matter found in the original books is available from the home page. Yet the ease of online access and a powerful search engine make this site more than just a mere repackaging of the print edition. It indicates how electronic reference resources can supplement their paper counterparts and greatly enhance their scope and coverage.
The entries themselves are signed and written by experts known for their scholarship and knowledge of opera history and musicology. Bibliographies and background information make the articles useful to opera novices and scholars alike. Most entries are the same as those in the 1992 print edition, but the home page has lists of updates and additions found in the online version. The long articles have outlines with hyperlinks to the different sections to facilitate navigation. Linked cross‐references are also included to allow the reader to explore related topics and jump from discussions of composers to their works, publishers, theaters, singers, and other contextual information. A right‐hand frame provides a searchable index of operatic abbreviations, charts and tables for a few entries, and the links to external sites for images, many of which are located on ClassicalNet <http://www.classical.net>, an informational site for classical music with discographies and links to Amazon and other Internet music vendors. Grove has formed a partnership with Operabase <http://www.operabase.com>, another site devoted to all facets of opera, which enables users reading a specific entry to click on the Operabase icon to get more information from that site. Additional links to other sites for images and content would be useful to expand the full potential of this source, but those may be added as the site continues to develop.
The search options give users several different access points to the material. They can browse an alphabetical listing of all the articles or locate articles by subject categories (subject areas such as biographies or aspects of opera, date and musical periods, and nationality). Users can do title searches and full‐text searches for keywords and phrases. The search engine incorporates different features that are well suited to the complex multilingual world of opera. In addition to standard Boolean searching, users can use concept searching (fuzzy logic principles of synonym and plural searching) and pattern searching (searches for similar spellings in different languages) to customize their searches and find related entries. The results are ranked according to the number of occurrences of the terms, the relationship between them, and the distance between terms in the texts. Although most users will not take full advantage of the specialized searching capabilities Grove has designed, they nonetheless make this database a sophisticated reference tool for complex queries and for research that cuts across different regions and operatic traditions.
The value of this and other online Grove reference works in the arts is great, and all libraries that support a music or arts collection will want to offer this resource to patrons. The future of print Grove editions and their relationship to their online equivalents will be interesting to chart, but with different pricing plans for different numbers of simultaneous users, more institutions may be able to offer the online version than could purchase the print set. If the forthcoming electronic New Grove Dictionary of Music is as well designed as the Dictionary of Opera and that of art, it too will be a must for electronic reference collections.
