• by Gavin O'Malley , April 21, 2010

Rejecting the perceived omnipotence of crowds -- and their preferred platforms like Google and Wikipedia -- Oxford University Press has launched a collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas. Ars Technica calls the new Oxford Bibliographies Online service “the Anti-Google,� and “sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines.� Users can explore specific bibliographic entries, which contain descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books -- or to subscribing libraries’ own catalog entries -- by either browsing or searching. Along with concerns over factual accuracy, OUP undertook this project to save professional researches time. You can’t come up with a search filter that solves the problem of information overload,� Damon Zucca, OUP’s Executive Editor of Reference told Ars. Rather, Zucca is betting that the solution to the problem lies in the caliber of content available.