H.W. Wilson Company calls Biography Reference Bank its “largest database yet!” Extending from antiquity to the present, this is indeed an immense collection of biographical information. Biography Reference Bank merges Wilson Biographies Plus Illustrated and full‐text articles, images, and abstracts from the other Wilson databases. Wilson Biographies Plus Illustrated currently consists of more than 30,000 images and links to full‐text articles from biographical reference resources from Wilson and those licensed from other publishers. Biography Index provides citations to more than 3,000 periodicals indexed by Wilson and approximately 2,500 books of individual and collective biography. Thus, this newly enhanced product now links to biographical profiles, feature articles, interviews, essays, obituaries, book reviews, performance reviews, and speeches in nearly all of the WilsonWeb databases, including Current Biography and the world artists, authors, composers, songwriters, musicians, and film makers series and the Junior Authors and Illustrators Series.
New additions to Biography Reference Bank include titles licensed from Oxford University, James Clarke, and the Congressional Directory. They join reference resources from Houghton Mifflin, Grove's, Garland, Greenwood, Oryx, Harvard University Press, Chambers Harrap, and Fitzroy Dearborn. These additions bring to over 500,000 the number of written entries currently in Biography Reference Bank. Retrospective coverage goes back to 1984 and the database is updated daily.
Biography Reference Bank is now powered by a new version of WilsonWeb, the publisher's search and retrieval service. The new version offers more effective searching and retrieval potential, including a dedicated subject thesaurus and full‐text searching, customization options for both users and administrators, and WilsonLink, SFX‐powered technology linking Wilson citations to subscribing libraries' OPACs and licensed databases.
WilsonWeb is uncluttered and easy to use. Help screens assist the user with basic and advanced searching, customizing the display, constructing a query, and using natural language, Boolean operators, stop words, truncation, and wildcards. Basic searching allows for natural language and Boolean searching. The advanced search options are by keyword, name, profession/activity, gender, ethnicity, place of origin, birth and death dates, and title of works. The user may also choose either the browse or thesaurus selection when searching. All‐Smart Search assigns a relevancy ranking to each record depending on which field in the citation it finds the search term or phrase and returns only records that feature all the terms searched. The ability to search by category is a great advantage when using this product. A simple search by the category Profession/Activity – for example “Nobel Laureates” – produces a list of all winners of the prize. The essays are well written and the images are of excellent quality.
In most cases, Biography Reference Bank provides a variety of biographical material on an individual. For example, the entry for Nobel Peace Prize winner Emily Greene Balch offers resource links to Current Biography, Nobel Prize Winners, American Reformers, and Notable American Women. Further links are available to citations for books and articles with Balch as the subject, and books by Balch. The amount of material on this year's winner for literature, Elfriede Jelinek, is impressive. Articles, reviews, and analytical essays are among the links available on this author, before now little known outside of academia.
However, I found coverage for African‐American and Black (ethnic categories used by Wilson) historical figures to be somewhat less extensive and thorough. W.E.B Dubois' record surprisingly affords the user only one resource link. Martin Delany, the nineteenth century abolitionist, physician, and Black Nationalist, is included in American Authors 1600‐1900 but no link is provide to citations of his books. A search for “African‐American” and “Classicist” fails to bring up William Sanders Scarborough even though he is in the database. Scarborough, considered by many to be the first African‐American Greek scholar of note, is identified as a “Classicist” but not “African‐American”. The same problem occurs when searching for “Black” and “Composers.” Samuel Coleridge‐Taylor, the late nineteenth century composer whose father was from Sierra Leone and mother was English, does not appear in the list of names generated by the search.
In addition, Wilson markets Biography Reference Bank as international in scope, but they appear to have some way to go in terms of balance. Searching for “politicians” by place of origin netted these results: politicians from Africa numbered 134, while those from Europe resulted in 900 hits and the USA 1,832. A combined search of “artists” and place of origin produced the following results: 4,343 European, 438 Asian, and 2,454 from the USA; the continent of Africa is represented by a mere 45 artists.
Biography Reference Bank is still an excellent biographical reference tool and is highly recommended for public and academic libraries. There is an annual rate for individuals and institutions, as well as networking prices and group rates. Wilson also offers a free 30‐day trial.
