The world faces shortages of many things. Information is not one of them. The trick is how to find reliable, authoritative stuff you can really use when every Google search produces a year’s worth of reading. Oxford University Press has a new service that it says will help you swim through the sea of knowledge without drowning in it.
This week the press unveiled Oxford Bibliographies Online, which it describes as “your expert guide to the best available scholarship across the social sciences and humanities.” The beta version covers only four subject areas–classics, criminology, Islamic studies, and sociology–but several more are in the works.
“Each module is a dynamic bibliographic tool containing a hierarchical body of interwoven entries designed to help students and scholars move through the most important scholarship, commentary, and resources in a specific area of research,” the press says. Translation: Oxford has hired teams of expert scholarly editors to pull together what they consider essential/useful resources in their fields and to write introductions to each subject. It’s all peer-reviewed, too.
You can browse a list of topics within each discipline or search by phrase or keyword. Look up “Cicero” in the classics section and you find an overview/introduction by Catherine Steel, a professor of classics at the University of Glasgow. From there you can click through to material about Cicero-related topics, e.g. the Ciceronian textual and editorial tradition, the Roman statesman’s speeches, letters and other works, translations, and biographical and historical information. Or–caveat lector–you will be able to click through to all that good stuff once Oxford’s programmers get a few glitches worked out.
Reviewing Oxford Bibliographies Online, the Ars Technica blog described it as “the anti-Google.” It says, “Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.”
Ah, but there is a catch. Expertise costs money, and publishers need something to sell. Unlike Wikipedia or Google, Oxford Bibliographies Online is not free. Subscription rates vary depending on whether you want an individual or an institutional subscription. How much will libraries and individual scholars decide Oxford-approved expertise is worth?—Jennifer Howard
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4 Responses to Oxford Bibliographies Online: the ‘Anti-Google’?
mbelvadi - April 23, 2010 at 6:52 am
The fourth area appears to be “social work”, not sociology. From the little I can see without a subscription, this appears to be yet another set of discipline-specific encyclopaedias. This article seems to be barely more than a publisher press release about the product, not even mentioning that it costs money until the end and not giving any sense of likely price. Comparing it to Google or Wikipedia is specious – how about comparing it to the various Gale Reference Online titles, or even some of Oxford’s own other online reference products – sources aimed at a similar market that also require subscriptions?
jenhoward - April 23, 2010 at 11:30 am
Thanks for the comment, mbelvadi. You’re right that it’s social work, not sociology. This item isn’t meant to be a review of OBO, just an alert to let readers know about it. It was worth noting because OUP seems to have high hopes for it and I think it will be a test case of how successful a subscription model like this can be in an online research environment that is partly driven by Google (including Google Scholar and Google Books) and, yes, by Wikipedia (and other crowd-sourced resources). If you or someone else has time to do the kind of comparisons you suggest with Gale Ref Online etc., I’d love to know what you conclude. I’d asked OUP to send me pricing info but I hadn’t received that before the item went live. Here’s what Rebecca Seger, OUP’s manager of library and online sales, sent me: ”Our institutional pricing model is that each subject is available individually for purchase or for subscription. Subscription prices start as low as $395 per subject for the smallest institutions, up to $995 for the largest (25,000+ students). We also have the ‘purchase’ option, where libraries can pay a larger upfront cost to ‘own’ the subject. It will include the first three years of updates at no additional cost, and then if they want to keep it updated, they will pay an update and hosting fee. If they don’t wish to pay that, we will deliver the content to them after the first three years. That’s kind of a complicated concept and would require some discussion, but in general, most libraries understand what we are talking about with that type of pricing. That cost ranges from a little more than $3000 for a single subject for the smallest institutions, to less than $8000 for the largest. Hosting/maintenance will run less than a 1/3 of cost of a subscription.” They’re still working out what individual access will cost.
libadmin - April 23, 2010 at 6:29 pm
I agree with ambelvadi, this article makes it sound like Oxford Bibliographies Online is a free, web-based service like Google, Google Scholar or Wikipedia, rather than just one of the latest fee-based online reference sources that any academic library might subscribe to. I know the author was just quoting, but to call it the “anti-google” makes no sense whatsoever, and this is not a test case of anything – similar formats and subscription models have existed for years.Yes, it’s nice to know the product exists, that’s about all anyone could really get out of this article. Three sentences would have just about covered it.I am sorry to be cranky, but I suspect the author is simply totally unfamiliar with the subject of academic online research tools and also not a librarian. I suggest she talk to one and gain a better understanding of the field before continuing to report in this area.
jenhoward - April 26, 2010 at 5:08 pm
Libadmin: Most reporters are not librarians (and vice versa). I do enjoy talking to librarians, though. Perhaps I should have said it’s a test case at a crucial time in scholarly publishing for a certain subscription model married to a certain kind of content.