GroveMusic (review)

GroveMusic. Edited by Laura Macy. London: Macmillan Reference; New York: Grove's Dictionaries, 2001-. http://www.grovemusic.com/index. html. Online version of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell; incorporating data from The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie. [Updated every six months. Individual subscriptions: $30 per month, $295 per year. Library subscriptions from $1,200 per year, with pricing plans for multi-year commitments and multi-user networks. Special pricing available for schools and school systems.]

The availability of the much anticipated New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in its electronic form, "www.grovemusic. com," is a moment to be considered. It is the first major full-text electronic reference tool to serve the musical public. This review will examine how well this format has been used in this endeavor; issues relating to content are, in general, outside its scope. For my work I used the Netscape Communicator 4.7 Web browser, and this review was last revised on 10 September 2001.

The foremost challenge to this new publication lies in its origins as a print dictionary --it has not yet been thought through thoroughly as an electronic tool. We can only hope that the experience of librarians will be taken into account as New Grove adapts to its new format.

With its update at the end of June 2001, GroveMusic has overcome some of its early bugs. Diacritics are now appearing in the abbreviations list, although the Help disclaimer about diacritics is not very reassuring:

Accents are not always displayed in search results. We do this so that the user does not have to enter accented characters in the search box. If you go to an entry and the headword does not display the correct accents then refresh the page by clicking on the table of contents in the left-hand frame. In the majority of cases this should solve any display problems. However if you are still experiencing problems please consult the Unicode information in Help.

Article titles missing from earlier versions have been added and a few of the peculiarities in searching have been addressed. New Grove Opera Online has been added to the site --but this has not been made obvious. The information about what the GroveMusic site contains is not revealed at the outset. Nor is there any apparent way to search the two dictionaries separately. It would be extremely nice to have that choice.

On the search page, the "Article search box" is the first place where the untutored user will go seriously astray. There is nothing to reveal that the implicit Boolean operator working in this search is "OR." Hence a user putting in the last and first names of a composer--an obvious search for many library users--will produce a much larger search result than might be expected. Most librarians would argue strongly for the implicit operator "AND." But even more importantly we would like users to be told the implicit Boolean structure of the search.

If the user is sophisticated enough to know that putting quotes around the surname followed by the first name should eliminate some of these problems, then a search on "Arnold Malcolm" ought to produce the articles in both New Grove and New Grove Opera. But this is not what happens. This search produces only the article in New Grove Opera. New Grove's heading includes Arnold's knighthood--but a search on "Arnold Sir Malcolm" takes you only to his "writings." A search on the surname alone yields a search result of sixty-eight hits (many for the first names of people). All of these search results claim the relevancy rating of eighty percent. The article about Malcolm Arnold in New Grove is no. 46 in this results list, while the article on him in New Grove Opera is no. 62. Thus, the list itself appears to be in no discernable order.

If users become too puzzled by a search result, they might see the...