Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press, subscriptions from 拢175
CAN you hear it? That鈥檚 the sound of another nail being driven into the coffin of reference libraries. They put the lid on when they invented the Internet. Oxford Reference Online鈥攁 searchable resource of about a hundred of Oxford鈥檚 reference works on a single website鈥攊s just the latest nail to be hammered home.
Curiously, librarians are directing operations from inside the box. While ORO will be available only to institutions (more than a thousand have already signed up for free trials), anyone with a membership card from a subscribing public library will be able to log on at home.
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It鈥檚 wonderful, of course. For people like New 杏吧原创 subeditors who need facts at their fingertips and don鈥檛 have time to browse through several books, this is another prayer answered. We鈥檝e been using The New Oxford Dictionary of English on CD-ROM for nearly a year. ORO is the same times a hundred. All of Oxford鈥檚 science dictionaries are on the site, plus English and modern language dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, general reference, history, classics, literature and others too numerous to mention. By the end of the decade, the equivalent of more than 300 books will be available.
At the moment, the site is fast and efficient. If you want to search every reference work simultaneously you can. It鈥檚 not as smart as Google, so if you don鈥檛 want to call up hundreds of irrelevant entries you have to enclose search words in quote marks and use Boolean terms. It鈥檚 jargon-free, with no ads or time-wasting graphics. For a free tour go to . You can almost hear the librarians weep.