The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) is an extensive and freely available bibliography of science fiction, fantasy, horror, magical realism and related genres. It primarily covers works of fiction (short and long forms) but also includes entries for essays, poems, reviews, and cover art, as well non‐genre works by authors primarily associated with speculative fiction. There are also entries indicating awards for which authors and their works were nominated or which they won. The database includes only works by authors for whom some or all of the published writings have appeared in English (originally or in translation) and generally excludes academic writing. Presently the work of just a few people, the ISFDB is moving toward a model wherein users will be able to edit and expand the database; although conceptually similar to the increasingly familiar wiki model, the editing features use a set of tools specifically designed for the bibliographical format rather than a more general wiki. The editing features were not available to users at the time of review.
The bibliography includes several levels of information. For each author, there are bibliography pages for long works, short works, all works sorted alphabetically, all works sorted chronologically, and an awards and nominations bibliography. Author pages also include birth and death information and pseudonym references, as well as author email address, Wikipedia references and links to relevant pages in the Internet Movie Database as appropriate.
Author bibliographies link to information on individual works. Each book title includes links to further publication information for individual editions, including some or all of the following: format (hardcover, trade paperback, etc.), ISBN, pagination, table of contents and cover illustration. Each story, poem or article title links to a list of books and magazines in which that story appeared. The bibliographies also indicate whether a story is part of a series, and there is a Superseries feature that allows series to be grouped together when a series is made up of several sub‐series (multiple trilogies, etc.).
The ISFDB includes extensive documentation describing the methods and standards for maintenance of the database. Much of the data is culled from web‐based bibliographies and from standard print bibliographies. At the time of review, the maintainers are just starting an ambitious plan to include bibliographic notes for each author to indicate discrepancies and omissions in various major bibliographic sources. They are also working to establish links to Wikipedia articles as available. The maintainers evidently seek to uphold strong authority control standards, although there is much work to be done to achieve the desired precision.
One of the ISFDB's great strengths is the scalable level of detail available for particular authors and titles. The database is a work in progress and an increasingly collaborative effort, so there will undoubtedly always be gaps in coverage. The relational database structure, however, allows for data to accumulate gradually as it becomes available. This means that incomplete and sometimes even minimal information is available for many publications. While incomplete information is undesirable in a finished reference work, it is not such a great flaw for a work in progress; partial information is enough for the potential user/editor to work with and to flesh out a minimal entry as time or interest allows. As much of the newest information in the database has been harvested by a webbot, it often requires human intervention before it integrates well into the elaborate data structure that makes the database so powerful. Similarly, the database has the ability to show links between a book review and the record for the book it applies to, but there are a great many reviews for which these links have not been established. It may be hoped that the move to user‐edited content will help to remediate these lapses.
The interface to this database is adequate, but would benefit from some usability improvements. Most of the navigation tools run along the left side of the web page, often running off the bottom of the screen (especially but not only on monitors with a screen resolution of 800 × 600 pixels). The tools for browsing for content by author, magazine title, or publisher are only available from the front page, which impedes navigation. The interface would also benefit from automatically expanding abbreviations such as “hc” (hardcover), “ss” (short story) and some other less intuitive notations.
Most problematic is the fact that the default view for author bibliographies is the Long Works bibliography. It is easy to miss the link to the Short Works bibliography, which disappears off the bottom of the screen even at a smallish font size on a 1,024 × 768 monitor. The Long Works bibliography is the default even for authors who have only published short works. Since the Long Works page does not contain a link to the Short Works bibliography in the main content frame, it would be easy for the user to conclude that there is an author entry with no publication data yet attached. Defaulting to a combined bibliography page (such as the chronological or alphabetical list of works), or adding links in the main body of the page between the short and long work bibliographies would alleviate this problem.
The basic search capabilities serve quite well. It is easy to search for an author, title or series, even with incomplete information. The advanced search features are extensive, but more problematic. Of the 26 searchable fields, ten result in error messages instead of search results, and another two require that the user have prior knowledge of the few possible search terms. It is to be hoped that the ongoing database improvements will include the activation of these visible but non‐functional search features. Once all of the features are available, the advanced search tools could be quite powerful.
This bibliography provides a tremendous asset to researchers and fans of speculative fiction. It is particularly useful for tracking down citations for rare short works and complete lists of extensive series. Other online bibliographies exist, but none has the breadth, depth, and sophistication of this database. The value and utility of the ISFDB will increase as the authority control improves, as more links are established and as new editors work to expand the contents to include more magazines and more content notes for existing works.
