The New Student's Reference Work

Covers of the five volumes of the The New Student's Reference Work.

Preface to the Digital Edition of the The New Student’s Reference Work

The New Student's Reference Work was published annually in the 1910s by F. E. Compton and Company in Chicago, Illinois. Presented here is the 1914 edition in 5 volumes. This work is now in the public domain, because it was published in the United States before 1923. See also the Wikipedia articles on the main editor Chandler B. Beach, his companion Frank Elbert Compton, and the follow-up product Compton’s Encyclopedia. The digitization of this work was announced on wikipedia-l on October 19, 2005.

The scanned copy was bought in an antiquarian bookstore in Norrköping, Sweden. According to a blue stamp on the title page, and some other places throughout the work, it once belonged to the Seamen’s Church Institute in San Francisco. The five volumes were scanned by LA2 in October 2005. Each page has been scanned as a high contrast JPEG color image in 300 dpi resolution, and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. Images are presented 700 pixels wide, corresponding to a screen resolution of approximately 120 dpi. To see them in full resolution, click twice on the scanned images. The included OCR text has yet to be proofread. This is done by editing the wiki text while comparing it to the scanned images, in two separate browser windows.

A combination of templates and categories constitute the backbone of the presentation on Wikisource, following the same pattern as was used on the German Wikisource for the digitization of Meyers Blitz-Lexikon, a one volume encyclopedic dictionary from 1932. These are the first two examples of how to combine Wikisource with scanned (facsimile) images of book pages. See also the suggestions for software improvements on meta: Digitizing books with MediaWiki.

Page numbers run from 1 to 2516 through all volumes. Each volume contains an average of 570 pages, including unpaginated illustration plates and maps. The first volume is introduced by 16 unpaginated pages of acknowledgements, a preface and portraits of the editors. The alphabetic encyclopedia ends at page 2138. The remainder of the fifth volume contains a 75 page long treatise on Arithmetic, 80 pages of Lesson Outlines, also known as “Student’s Manual”, 114 pages or Classified Questions on alphabetically arranged topics ranging from Agriculture to Zoology, and finally a 116 pages long Analytical Index.

The pagination shows a few pecularities. In volume 2, page 552 is followed by two illustration plates and pages 552a and 552b. On the opening where page 590 is the verso (left-hand side page), the recto (right-hand) is a page of illustrations without pagination. On the next opening, the verso is 591, and odd pagination for the verso continues until page 885, where the same trick is repeated to restore the order. In volume 4, page 1702 is followed by 1702a, 1702b, 1702c, and 1702d.