Oxford Bibliographies Online is a tool designed to help busy researchers find reliable sources of information in half the time by directing them to exactly the right chapter, book, website, archive, data set they need for their research. It is a springboard for new research that allows for fluid movement between texts and databases within a given institution’s collection and beyond. It is a starting point for organizing a research plan, or for preparing a writing assignment, or syllabus. The style and approach is accessible to student readers, but because of the depth of coverage it is of great use to faculty as well.
ERC:Nancy Friedland
Access:IP
Username / Password for remote access: columbiau1 / columbiau1
Trial dates: 05/07/2010-06/06/2010
I’m finding this resource rather clunky and confusing to use.
I chose Classics and searched on the keyword “Aphrodite”–I got 13 citations among 6 entries. It wasn’t entirely clear what those entries were, even after I clicked through. It turned out I was in the subsection on “Aphrodite” in the entry on Greek religion (actually the sub-subsection on Aphrodite in a subsection on “Gods”); the “Greek Religion” bibliography inhabited the entire screen and I was now somewhere halfway down it without any sense of where I was in relation to anything else on the screen. There was another entry, “Roman Religion,” where I hit somewhere near the bottom of a subsection on “Divine Status.” It seems like it would have made more sense for the Greek religion and Roman religion bibliographies to have had a parallel structure, and for an Aphrodite search to have lined up in some way with the Roman religion entry on Venus.
I also tried browsing the entries, but the headings seemed to have been chosen almost randomly (not sure who would be looking specifically for a section on “Arena Spectacles” as opposed to, say, “Sports” or “Entertainment”). And once one enters a bibliography it’s unwieldy to navigate: it is, essentially, a reading guide digitized. I didn’t even notice the navigable sidebar ToC until the 3rd or 4th time I clicked through, and it would be nice if the ToC indicated where you were when you landed smack in the middle of a 20-screen expanse of print.
I do like the mouseover citations for the hyperlinks in the editorial matter, because clicking through to find out what they are lands you in the middle of yet another bibliography the identification of which is challenging.
Neither the ToC nor the browser window title indicate the name of the bibliography once you’re inside it.
Mainly, it strikes me as LAZY. They could have made this into a nice relational database but that would have taken too much work, so they just scanned the whole bibliography and added a smattering of hyperlinks in the introductory matter.
It’s true that searching L’annee philologique for “Arena spectacles” doesn’t garner much, but I’m not sure how many people need an entire bibliography on arena spectacles when they could profitably search APh for component terms.
It’s nice that OBO includes both primary and secondary sources but, frankly, I think they need to do a little more work before they charge real money for something like this.