I found it interesting that the Australian Oxford Dictionary had the most extensive definition of the six. One thing that I hadn't paid attention to until now was that "English" dictionaries in the Oxford Reference Collection cover Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, U.K., and American English.
2. It wasn't quite clear to me what the purpose of the links was. The explanation only mentions "the list of links for that book." Are these links that are included in each book? I would have liked a little more information about the links on this page. The Help Contents did explain that the links were context-sensitive links to external websites that might be useful. Many of the websites did look helpful, but I wasn't sure how much help the newspaper sites would be. To serve as examples of English?
The song used to illustrate nouns was "My Favorite Things" from "The Sound of Music."
(Just fyi, when I was exploring the links, the first one I clicked on, "Guide to Writing a Successful Press Release" resulted in a "403 Forbidden" error message.)
3. 14 examples of boats and ships are given in the first link to Visual English Dictionary. (Not sure how useful this question was.)
Nice visual images in this dictionary, but I was annoyed at having to click the link to see each illustration. I think I've been spoiled by Google image search.
4. 18 titles are offered in the English Language Reference category. (Not sure how useful this question was.)
5. I chose the Concise Oxford German Dictionary (English-German) and did a search for the word "encyclopedia." The results were interesting. The spelling in the results was for "encyclopaedia," so it looks like this dictionary uses the British spelling. (At least the American spelling was cross-referenced.) The German word for encyclopedia is "das Lexikon" or "die Enzyklopädie."
The next entry in the results was:
2. walking
attributive adjective a ~ dictionary/encyclopaedia joc. ein wandelndes Wörterbuch/Konversationslexikon.
This confused me. Why did "walking" appear? When I looked at the full entry, it referred to "a walking dictionary/encyclopaedia" which I had never heard of. Apparently this entry had several phrases, one of which included the word "encyclopaedia" which is why it showed up in the results list.
You can sort the entries in alphabetical order or relevance, change the number of results per page, and print or email search results.
6. The quote about "abolish" from John Locke:
"The end of law is, not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom."
It took me a minute to find the link to "browse this subject." The mouseover helped me realize it was the browse tab in the top navigation. For some reason I found it funny that there was a "Go to" search box to search for a word to browse (Although the Help explains that it's not really a search tool as such, just a way to navigate the index.) The links take you to an entry heading for the person who used the term in a quotation. In this case there were many quotes from John Locke, and I couldn't easily the find the one with "abolish" in, so I used the ctrl-f feature to find the term.
7. The map of Syria that displayed in the results was very small and didn't show very much. It took me a minute to see the links in the left-hand navigation which showed that there was a political map and a physical map for Syria. These maps were better, but I would have liked more options to enlarge the maps. (Again, spoiled by Google?)
8. The World Encyclopedia includes sections on climate, history, politics, and economy. It seems like a very traditional, objective encyclopedia entry. The Guide to Countries of the World has some of the same demographic data, but does not speak so much to the climate or the history of Syria. I also didn't care for the way the headings were displayed for "In this Entry" in the left-hand navigation for Guide to Countries of the World. The heading is one long phrase: ("After several years of retreat Syria is again a major player in Middle East politics")
The Guide to Countries of the World "outlines contemporary social, economic, political and religious issues" and "is fully up to date with the latest key facts." The entry in this encyclopedia seemed much more interpretive and somewhat biased that the entry in World Encyclopedia:
"But in political terms there has been little progress. Assad initially tried to give the impression that his reform efforts were being held back by the ‘old guard’ in the government and the army. This now rings hollow as he replaced them with equally hardline characters.
While Bashar has proved less repressive than his father, he has been no less effective at retaining firm control. The secret police are omnipresent, and human rights workers or dissident bloggers can be imprisoned for ‘weakening the national spirit’."
While Bashar has proved less repressive than his father, he has been no less effective at retaining firm control. The secret police are omnipresent, and human rights workers or dissident bloggers can be imprisoned for ‘weakening the national spirit’."
9. 25 entries were found for the term "recycling" using the Quick Search box, plus the definition entry in the box, so 26 total. I didn't see the "refine by book" option until I clicked one of the entries under the "refine by subject" link. I clicked on the subject Earth & Environmental Sciences entry and three of the books were: Oxford Companion to the Earth, Dictionary of Environment and Conservation, and Dictionary of Geography.
10. I opted not to set up an Oxford Reference Collection Online button on our library website. (Our library has a committee that decides what will go on our site.) I would like to try this out by adding a button to my Languages LibGuide at a later date, however.
Observations
I think the Oxford Reference Collection is a great resource and the exercises helped me figure out some of its unique features and intricacies. I will definitely be using it for both my own reference needs as well as showing our patrons how to use it.
I also found the following information in the printing/emailing Help section of interest. I think this would be particularly helpful to know, especially considering many languages have diacritics/accents/special characters that are important to know. Language students consult the dictionaries specifically to see if there are any diacritics and it wouldn't be very helpful if these got lost during emailing.
Certain accents and special characters may be lost from the text when it is emailed, but sending the email in HTML form (the default option) will retain most but not all of the formatting. If you choose not to email the entry in HTML form, by unchecking the Send as HTML box, it will be sent as plain text.
Accents and special characters are present in the data as Unicode. Unicode provides a unique number for every character which is then rendered by your browser as the appropriate character. If the recipient's email software supports Unicode, switch the Select the character set radio buttons, which appear above the Send the email button, to Unicode. When you receive your email, make sure that your email software has the encoding set to Unicode (UTF-8) so that the special characters appear correctly. If the recipient's email software does not support Unicode, set the Select the character set button to Latin-1.