Crowdsourced knowledge repositories like Wikipedia are great for finding the answer to questions that aren't particularly urgent or critical, but their problems are legion, well-documented, and oft-lamented if you're trying to use them for serious work—especially scholarly work. Search engines aren't any better for scholars, because Google searches not only produce way too much information for even the most obscure topics, but they also don't tell you which sources experts would consider really important.
It turns out that for certain topics, the crowds just aren't very wise, and algorithms even less so—in these situations there's no substitute for old-fashioned expertise, but that expertise can be hard to come by if your professor's office hours are booked solid.
Oxford University Press thinks it has the answer, or at least a first shot at the answer, for these problems with the launch of what could fairly be called the Anti-Google: Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO).
The OBO tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library's own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. 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.
"We did about 18 months of pretty intensive research with scholars and students and librarians to explore how their research practices were changing with the proliferation of online sources," Damon Zucca, OUP’s Executive Editor, Reference, told Ars. "The one thing we heard over and over again is that people were drowning in scholarly information, and drowning in information in general. So it takes twice as much time for people to begin their research."
OBO grew out of that research, with the goal of helping scholars and students deal with information overload, possibly by skipping Google entirely. The resulting bibliography is fairly simple and lean, which is exactly the point. The messy and often politicized work of sorting and sifting the information has already been done for users, so that they can drill down directly to a list of the main publications in their target area.
"You can't come up with a search filter that solves the problem of information overload," Zucca told Ars. OUP is betting that the solution to the problem lies in content, which is its area of expertise, and not in technology, which is Google's and Microsoft's.
To trust OBO's content, you have to trust its selection and vetting process. To that end, OUP is making the list of contributing scholars and editors freely available. Each subject area has an Editor in Chief who's a top scholar in the field, and an editorial board of around 15 to 20 scholars. The EIC and editorial board either write the bibliographic entries themselves, or they select other scholars to do the work.
The launch version of OBO covers only four subject areas: Classics, Islamic Studies, Social Work and Criminology. But OUP has plans to add 10-12 new subject areas (known as modules) within the next year. Each subject area contains between 50 and 100 individual entries, and that number should grow at the rate of about 50 to 75 entries per year.
To get an idea of what a section's editorial board looks like, check out the "About" page for the Classics topic. The EIC is Dee L. Clayman of CUNY, and the board consists of 17 of the top classics scholars in the field. The topic has a total of 51 entries written by 38 different scholars.
Evaluations of each scholar's work and worth will differ, but at least users can see exactly how the sausage is made. Contrast this to Google or Bing, where the search algorithm that produces results is a closely guarded secret.
The word that Zucca used a number of times in our chat was "authority," and OUP is betting that individual and institutional users will value the authority enough that they'll be willing to pay for access to the service.
As of today's launch, OBO is either $29.95 a month or $295.00 a year. This pricing will be too steep to fit in most student budgets, so OUP is probably counting on generating most of its revenues from institutional subscribers.
This paywall is the only feature of OBO that seems truly unfortunate, given that the competition (search and Wikipedia) is free. High school kids and motivated amateurs will be left slumming it with whatever they can get from the public Internet, and OBO's potential reach and impact will be severely limited. But even if a paywall is the only model that works for funding this kind of specialized content, at least it's an improvement over what came before.
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