Oxford University Press is making hundreds of its core language and subject reference dictionaries, famous Oxford Companions, and other reference works available on a new website. Oxford Reference Online is expected to total well over 130 million words (equivalent to over 300 books) by the end of the decade. This could make it the biggest general knowledge resource on the web.
On 21 March 2002 the first part of the new Oxford Reference Online website, Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection, was launched. It comprises over 1.5 million entries - dictionary definitions, facts, figures, people, places, sayings, and dates - from around 100 of Oxford's central English and bilingual dictionaries, usage, quotations, and subject reference books all combined to create ONE huge integrated knowledge resource. The service covers over 20 subjects in the humanities, social sciences, and science and medicine - from Art and Astronomy to Shakespeare and Zoology.
The result of a two-year collaborative project between OUP Oxford and OUP New York that has cost well over £1 million/$1.5 million, Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection is available on subscription to academic, corporate, and specialist libraries, schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and government offices around the world. Subscriptions start from £175/$250 per annum, and more than 3000 institutions have already signed up for free trials of the site. Users will be able to access the service in their library, but also remotely via library card authentication.
A major benefit to users will be the updating the service will receive from Oxford's extensive programme of new references and regular new editions of works on central subjects. With up to 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 ever before.
Oxford Reference Online is the perfect complement to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, launched in March 2000. 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. Choose a term, and access its definition, translation into four European languages, inclusion in famous quotations and proverbs, its meaning in a host of different subjects - and those are just a few of the places a typical ORO search will take you. Discovering answers to questions that could have taken hours in a traditional reference library will take just minutes online.
Oxford Reference Online has been designed by users for users. More than any other product Oxford University Press has launched in decades, Oxford Reference Online is the child of its customers. Nearly 10 rounds of market research were run over 24 months in the US and the UK. Scores of librarians, academics, students, teachers, professionals, school children, and general library users were involved at difference stages.
From 'Aalenian' in the Dictionary of Earth Sciences to 'ZZ Ceti star' in the Dictionary of Astronomy, over 40 million words (equivalent to over 60,000 book pages) have been digitised in order to provide more than 500Mb of data. Extensive innovations in searching will give users the means to exploit this mass of reference data with ease. Semantico, the Brighton (UK) based online reference developer, has used state-of-the-art technology to complete the challenging and complex task of building Oxford Reference Online to be highly effective but simple to use. The site is jargon-free with no ads, no fussy graphics, and no distractions. It will be the perfect reference resource for a 13 year-old finding information for a school project, a business-user checking facts, or a student or scholar checking dates.
The best way to discover OxfordReference.com is to see it for yourself.
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