Oxford Reference Online, Oxford University Press, subscriptions from £175
CAN you hear it? That’s 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—a searchable resource of about a hundred of Oxford’s reference works on a single website—is 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…
