According to its User's Guide, The Encyclopedia of Chicago features “a dynamic and unprecedented metropolitan history”. The electronic resource contains “[t]housands of historical resources – including articles, photos, maps, broadsides and newspapers – related to Chicago's colorful and complex history”, and is a collaboration of three highly reputable and authoritative organizations' collections of original Chicago historical materials – the Chicago Historical Society, The Newberry Library & Northwestern University.
The user‐friendliness of the website makes it accessible for all levels of online researching expertise. Access to the website is free, its pages load quickly and the delay between executing a search and getting the results is minimal. The overall appearance of the website is visually appealing and invites the user to utilize its contents. The encyclopedia's main page features a minimal amount of text, focusing mainly on the title of the website, an aged newspaper‐coloured montage background of words and images, a series of black and white images from the collection and a brief navigation tool bar in the upper left hand corner colour‐coordinated with the rest of the page. The page's only drawback is that the navigation bar is not as prominently displayed as it should be. If accessibility is a key objective for this web resource, then the editors should make the navigation tools more evident for less intuitive users.
Delving into the encyclopedia, users will find its contents to be quite diverse and informative. The website's sections include an alphabetical index of historical sources, a variety of maps of Chicago, special features including interpretive digital essays and photo galleries on topics such as the public faces of religion, and a video gallery entitled Chicago on Screen. All of these features are enhanced when viewed on Flash‐friendly browsers for both Windows and Macintosh systems. The authors take care to make sure users are aware of what computer requirements are needed in order to best use the site's advanced features. Users who are comfortable with using multimedia features of websites will find these instructions easy to understand. However, to a beginning online researcher, this litany of minimum requirements to use these special enhancements might prove to be a hindrance to a satisfying first experience with the site.
The website's User's Guide provides excellent guidance on how to use the encyclopedia to its best advantage. It caters to both the first‐time visitor as well as the experienced one, detailing how to use the site's various elements like its entry pages, its historical sources and other special features. Combining text with detailed screen shots, the guide offers assistance to several learning styles, a bonus courtesy not always found in help files for web sites. However, the site lacks an actual, named Help option. In fact, I had to search for any kind of contact information such as an e‐mail address or toll‐free telephone number that patrons could use to submit questions to about the encyclopedia. I happened to click on the Additional Information on Copyright and Permissions link at the bottom of the main page, and found a menu of options for introductory pages on the resource, including a history of how the site came into existence and a contact list, where I finally found an e‐mail address where users could send “inquiries”. This menu is not linked anywhere else on the website. With this information so difficult to find, one might infer that the authors do not want users to contact them unless absolutely necessary. While I applaud their confidence in the user‐friendliness of the site, I also would recommend making the site a little less autonomous and more of a two‐way street between the users and the editors.
The search engine within this resource allows users to search the entire site using keywords, Boolean logic and wildcard characters like asterisks. Once a search is entered, the search results are ranked according to whether or not the search terms appear in the title or the body of an entry, and are then ordered by type of materials including Authored Entries (A‐Z), Business Dictionary listings, Biographical Dictionary listings, Print maps created for the encyclopedia, Historical Sources (including photos, documents, and maps) and timeline listings and year pages. The one feature that is not apparent with this resource is any printing, exporting to a disk and/or e‐mailing functionality. Users may presume that said information might be printed or exported by using their browser's features, but e‐mailing the document might not be possible, at least not within the parameters of the encyclopedia's features.
Overall, the Encyclopedia of Chicago is a visual treat for users to behold. Its wealth of resources on the history of the Windy City enables researchers of all levels to explore, in text, photographs, maps and multimedia, a multitude of angles of Chicago's past. Academic, public, school and special library users would benefit from this resource's contents. Aside from the need for a few improvements to make accessing the encyclopedia even better, I would recommend this online resource to anyone with even a passing interest in learning more about how Chicago began and where it is heading.
