the Oxford Reference Collection: an idea

Have you ever looked at the sheer number of works available at Oxford reference Online? It’s staggering — and this is first-rate stuff, too. However, subscriptions are quite expensive, beyond the reach of most individual users: obviously Oxford is selling these resources primarily to libraries, especially university libraries.

Fair enough. But I wonder whether another model might not work. Consider this: Oxford could offer the jewel in their crown, the Oxford English Dictionary, for free — yes, I know, they now charge three hundred bucks a year for it — so, okay, maybe not free, but at a greatly reduced price — and then use some of the screen space to advertise their other reference works. It seems to me that if users of the OED regularly saw the many, wonderful resources available to them, subscriptions to those less obviously central works would increase dramatically.

And then there’s this possibility, which came to my mind via a tweet by Jason Jones: What if Oxford created a digital environment which would allow users of all their reference works to tag entries and link them to entries in other reference works? That is, what if users gradually built a reservoir of metadata that would connect entries in the OED with entries in the Visual English Dictionary or the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment or the Dictionary of Hinduism? What a boon that would be for students and scholars — and for Oxford, the value of whose reference collection would be dramatically increased.

shelving

Wonderful post at A Working Library about libraries, ways of organizing information, and the varieties of metadata:

Aby Warburg’s library opened in Hamburg in 1926. In Manguel’s telling, Warburg incessantly arranged and rearranged his books, moving titles from shelf to shelf in an attempt to map the paths among them. Visitors spoke of books of literature shelved next to those on geography, art history leaning against philosophy. At one point, unable to move the books at the speed of his mind, Warburg resorted to tacking notecards to a cloth — each card relating a text or image, their placement on the cloth relating them to other texts. The cards could be lifted and moved around at will — a visualization of the ongoing, cacophonous conversation around them.

His was a library as creative act — it exchanged the rigor of a single taxonomy for one that was fluid, eccentric, human. In so doing he delayed the act of finding a text indefinitely. You didn’t so much as look for a book as look for the thread that linked it to its neighbor; you didn’t rest on a single title, but instead travelled through them all, assured that wherever you were going, you would never arrive.

I wonder, then, if the promise of an ebook isn’t the book but the library. And if, in all our attention to a new device for reading, we’re neglecting methods for shelving. A search engine cannot compete with Warburg’s delicate, personal library. The metadata of a book extends beyond the keywords held between its covers to the many hands the text has passed through; it’s not enough just to scan every page. We need to also scan the conversations, the notes left in the margins, the stains from coffee, tea, and drink. We need to eavesdrop on the readers, without whom every book is mute. That is the promise I seek.

For more on Warburg, see here. For a similar reflection on neglected metadata, see here.