A Great Tool for Booksellers: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- By Renee Roberts
No need to page through piles of volumes when you can search them electronically
by Renee Magriel Roberts
Writing really great book descriptions is the key to better bookselling, which I define as providing excellent service and accurate information for customers, combined with being able to ask fair prices for the material we sell. A good description goes beyond the physical and edition definition. I like being able to accurately discuss the author, the book's importance and place in the author's oeuvre, and the environment in which the work was created. It is not always easy getting information that is reliable and getting it efficiently, so I was ecstatic to find a tool that will help me do the job better and faster.
Early on I purchased a physical set of the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) for this purpose. Something of a British institution, my nineteenth-century set offers detailed biographies of British notables, along with detailed bibliographies. Since we have a number of antiquarian biographies in our stock, these reference works are invaluable, as they present a contemporary look at authors and their works, as well as the biographical subjects. However, I have recently set my books aside in favor of the electronic version available by subscription from Oxford University Press (www.oup.com).
This new online reference tool, available for around $300/year, covers some 55,800 lives and 10,300 portrait illustrations. It includes the complete text of the original DNB, which being in the public domain can be used without restraint in any listings I create. Not confined to the 19th century, this new DNB goes right up to the present and is continuously updated, so it works for modern British authors as well.
Unlike my books, this new tool is electronic, so I can readily cut and paste information, saving valuable time when I'm composing book descriptions. It includes reference material (such as a list of kings and queens, Nobel prize winners, and so forth). I can search not only by name, but also do full text searches on all the biographies that contain any word or group of words.
So, for example, if I would like to know more about the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge which is sponsoring one of my books, I will immediately discover the names of many of the notables and authors involved in that Society, including Henry Lord Brougham, Charles Knight, Sir Charles Bell, George Birkbeck, and pages of others.
I can search not only under the full name, but also search pseudonyms, nicknames, aristocratic titles, performing names, initials, incomplete names, and name changes. This is particularly handy if I do not know to whom a pseudonym belongs -- a quick check can reveal the real author (and perhaps save me from selling a valuable book for too little).
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A Great Tool for Booksellers: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- By Renee Roberts
The DNB recently added a section on pioneer photographers.
Searches can be both broadly made and then refined. A full text search, for example, can be narrowed down to only search for place names. Advanced searching can also seek people in innovative ways. Some examples given by the DNB include people:
- Killed at the battle of AgincourtPainted by Holbein
- Shoemakers
- Born in Cornwall before 1600
- Neighbours in Edinburgh's Princes Street
- Nineteenth-century women explorers
- Buried in Highgate cemetery
- Artists educated at the Slade in the twentieth century
- Musicians who lived in New York
The DNB is full of special features. Recently, for example, the DNB added a section on leading photographers, called "Lives Through a Lens", invaluable research for anyone entering information on books about photography or which contain historical photographs. A few examples of some of the recent additions include:
- Alexander Bassano (1829-1913): one of Victorian England's leading portrait photographers who captured numerous stars of the arts, as well as politicians and members of the royal family. More than 200 portraits by Bassano illustrate the DNB.
- Walter Stoneman (1876-1958): appointed curator of the National Portrait Gallery's national photographic record in 1917, Stoneman captured the images of 40,000 influential Britons.
- John French (1907-1966): a pioneering newspaper fashion photographer, French's quest for perfection inspired his assistants Terence Donovan and David Bailey.
- Sagar Mitchell (1866-1952) and James Kenyon (1850-1925): their recently discovered films of industrial Lancashire, shown by the BBC in 2005, introduce a modern audience to a previously lost world.
All of these photographers, and their images, and the subjects of their images, are entirely electronically cross-referenced and searchable on the DNB.
For real biography junkies, the DNB will email you a new biography every day and has cumulative "Lives of the Week". And for browsers, the DNB allows browsing alphabetically and chronologically. Reference lists allow you to select office holders, such as "Lord Chancellors of England and Great Britain". Every item that is listed is linked to its full-text biography.
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A Great Tool for Booksellers: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- By Renee Roberts
The DNB is now available electronically and in print.
If you don't want to read your biography on a screen, no problem. A simple selection allows you to email the text to yourself (or to anyone else, including a customer), and you can also print out the pages you see.
The Oxford DNB goes up to 2004 and includes no living individuals. Although the focus is on individuals who were born and lived in the British Isles, the DNB includes people who went on to make a mark in other countries, who lived in British territories or under British rule, or who made a mark on British life.
Not confined to individual biographies, the DNB also offers up shorter related biographies, as well as histories of groups and families.
One feature I found particularly exciting is the Highlighted Search. You can use the mouse to highlight a name or a group of words, click on "Go" and the DNB will search for all the other instances of that name or phrase in its database. This is an excellent way to find important related material.
In developing bibliographies for clients, the DNB is also invaluable. It includes lists of each author's works, as well as primary reference material, and so is a great place to start. It is also considerably more authoritative than random searches via Google.
I initially balked at the $300/year subscription fee, which to be honest seemed more appropriate for a library than a small shop like ours, but as a timesaver, the DNB is really unparalleled. The biggest bottleneck we all have in Internet bookselling is getting our books online and getting them online well. Especially in the case of rare material, where one cannot just swipe a barcode to get all the information, developing descriptions is particularly time-consuming. I find that I can get much better information about books and authors much faster by using this tool, a time saving that is easily worth the money spent each month on the subscription. Is saving me hours and hours of time, plus accurately upgrading the quality of my listings worth around $30/month? I think so.
For more information, go to www.oup.com, select the DNB, and take the guided tour. You will have a great time browsing the DNB and you may find it useful in your business as well.
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