‘a great resource for academics and information professionals .... Oxford Scholarship Online is an easily-manageable way for librarians to give their users access to a growing OUP list. Mark Chillingworth took a look.
In author Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials there are two Oxfords, each existing in a different, parallel world. Today, academic information exists in different, but parallel, worlds too - printed and online versions of books. Oxford Scholarship Online, from the Oxford University Press (OUP), makes available OUP's printed academic books on the world wide web.
Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) is an archive of the four key areas of philosophy, political science, religion, and economics and finance books. Aimed at researchers and academics globally, OSO features the full texts of 700 academic books published by the OUP.
The opening page of the OSO site is an attractive interface with a graphic of the dreaming spires. To access books, users can either use the Quick Search, or access the channel pages of the four subject areas. The subject homepages include a list of subsidiary topic areas to help users refine their searches. Clicking through to a subject area will present users with a list of relevant books, along with the ISBN number, date of publication and author details. Clicking on the title takes users through to an abstract summary, table of contents and list of keywords. This is all very nicely designed - easy to drill-down and logically planned, not to mention easy on the eye. Internet Explorer users can also use the View menu to select a text size that makes reading the on-screen text easier - the page will adjust accordingly.
Each book homepage offers a number of navigational methods to access the content. Within the left-hand navigation panel is a contents box with a full chapter listing. Clicking on chapter titles here will take you through to the full text. A nice touch within the full text is the addition of page breaks and guides that allow researchers to see where the same text would be in the printed version - essential for citation purposes. An alternative means of navigation is the book's table of contents beneath the abstract and keywords on the homepage. Each chapter heading offers users the opportunity to view either an abstract of the chapter or the full text.
Abstracts can also be viewed within the contents listing by clicking on the 'Show Chapter Abstracts' link, which is located above the cover image. If a user selects to have the abstract shown within the contents, they cannot see the keywords of the chapter, although if the user clicks on the abstract link, the keyword is listed beneath the displayed abstract.
The full text of each chapter features footnotes within the text. Clicking on these takes you to the footnote and a handy 'Back to text' link. The DOI appears at the bottom of each screen and the page and chapter numbers of the book appear at the top. Users have five search options. The Quick Search is fast and reliable. There is an advanced search suited to those who know some of the details of the work they want to access. Along the top of the site, there are options to search by title, subject and author. Titles shows an A-to-Z of all the titles held on the OSO site. The Authors index lists all OSO books in alphabetical order of author. A 'What's New' page lists new titles that have been recently added, as well as updates to the site. When we looked, OSO had added bibliographic machine-readable cataloguing (MARC), open URL-compliance and 42 new titles.
Annual subscriptions are based on the number of subjects to which an organisation subscribes. One subject module costs £950 per annum for five concurrent user licences, rising to £2,470 for all four modules (prices exclude VAT). Management tools include usage reports broken down into sessions, pages per session, entries viewed and the number of searches conducted on the site. This scholarship is mostly suited to academic users, but corporate information professionals may want to use this service to gain access to academic material on economics in Asia, efficient monopolies, crime and politics in the US, or the Euro.
...this is a well-designed, powerful interface for OUP's printed scholarship. Librarians will find it an excellent alternative for managing more than 700 essential texts in these major disciplines.’ Information World Review
