Publisher to Build Giant Library Online
06/04/2002
In March 2002 Oxford University Press will publish its core language and subject reference dictionaries online for the first time. A two-year collaborative project between OUP Oxford and OUP New York will make 100 titles available as a subscription service to academic, corporate, and specialist libraries, schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and government offices around the world - from San Francisco to Sydney.
Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection comprises well over one million dictionary definitions, facts, figures, people, places, sayings, and dates from 100 of Oxford's central English and bilingual dictionaries, usage, quotations, and subject reference books all combined to create one integrated knowledge resource.
A key benefit of the service will be regular updating from Oxford's extensive programme of new references and regular new editions of works on core subjects. With around 30 new and revised works due between now and 2004 on subjects such as statistics, tourism, sport, archaeology, and business, expanding a reference collection and keeping it up to date will be quicker and simpler than before.
The initiative to put Oxford's reference texts online has already meant the digitization of tens of millions of words, and the complex and extensive restructuring and tagging of texts. From 'Aalenian' in the Dictionary of Earth Sciences to 'ZZ Ceti star' in the Dictionary of Astronomy, material equivalent to over 60,000 book pages is being turned into more than more 500Mb of data.
Director of the project, David Swarbrick, says: "ORO is the perfect complement to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, launched 18 months ago. Its aggregated texts offer a new global standard for reference across the internet - and in the process make accessible Oxford's massive reference assets. Fact-finding may be its most obvious function but its vast range of data will also take users into genuinely new areas of knowledge, allowing them to move from one piece of information to another - from oil as a commodity to Oil! as a novel, from daydreaming in French to lucid dreaming in psychology."
Oxford Reference Online has been designed by users for users. Multiple one-to-one and workshop sessions with librarians, academics, students, and other reference users in the UK and USA have been a key part of creating the development brief for the service which was then built up by the online reference developer Semantico. Searchability is the key to meeting users' needs. It is not just a question of what the 21st-century reference user needs (a 13 year-old finding out about astronomy, a business user checking facts, an academic checking dates) - it is a question of what they would like to do, but currently cannot. ORO will offer a wide choice of search options that will mean that searching for a quick definition or for a detailed explanation of a complex term are both simple to do and fast.
Managing Information
