
Oxford University Press launches the Anti-Google - glymor
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/04/oxford-university-press-launches-the-anti-google.ars
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balding_n_tired
Nearer Wikipedia's turf, surely, than Google's.

The three entries I looked at, "Herodotus", "Homer" and "Early Christianity"
seemed unobjectionable but also not particularly informative. What audience do
they have in mind for this? I couldn't off the top of my head have told you
the organization of Herodotus's histories; but if I hadn't read ever read
them, I don't think the summary would tell me why I'd care to.

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_delirium
I'm not sure if it's Ars's writeup or the flavor of the project, but it seemed
to have a sort of distasteful / desperate air of, "ugh, noobs on the internet
writing crap, make way for the REAL authorities pls". (I'm even in academia
myself and sort of cringe at that, because it's pretty much the stereotype of
the condescending academic.)

It seems more likely to be used as just a literature-search aid by students,
though. At $300, no normal people are actually going to use it instead of
Wikipedia or Google, and probably most non-student academics will continue to
use Google Scholar or other deeper searches.

One thing that would be interesting is if it grows into a good enough set of
annotated bibliographies that researchers would find it valuable too. There
are a lot of areas without a good recent survey article in them, so something
like this at least listing all the major work in the area would be useful to
scan.

But: isn't it sort of ominous to say that the "politicized work of sorting and
sifting the information has already been done for users"? It seems that the
cases where something's politicized are exactly those where I'd rather have a
Wikipedia-style smorgasbord summarizing all the opinions (along with an
accurate summary of who holds them and how mainstream those people are),
rather than a carefully sifted list of the Correct opinions. But I could see
that it might be useful if you were an undergrad just looking for a reference,
and wanting it not to be a fringe one.

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sunir
I am encouraged that researchers are trying to change their processes and
policies to better fit the Internet. I think this is a good half way step.

In my opinion, it would be more valuable to go further towards the Wikipedia
model. Of course, I say this because I've put my fingers where my mouth is and
am building it.

After experimenting for a couple years at <http://www.bibwiki.com>, I
discovered a decent model to keep things organized. Make the wiki-like
bibliographies group owned rather than publicly owned, and so I have created
<http://www.bibdex.com>

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yankeeracer73
Another resource here in the US is the Extension service:
<http://extension.org> . This has been their goal online for awhile now - to
provide peer reviewed material that is a "cut above" the stuff you'd find
online. Kind of a cool transition from local county offices considering
extension has been around since 1862.

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zandorg
What about Google Scholar?

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pierrefar
Seems very interesting. A knol-like knowledge base of everything.

The website: <http://www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com/> . It's VERY slow
right now, so I can't say more because I haven't seen anything beyond the home
page.

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pavs
A true anti-Google. Slow and non-relevant.

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swombat
And non-free.

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carbocation
And limited to Classics, Criminology, Islamic Studies, and Social Work.

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acg
_fairly be called the Anti-Google_

It might be pedantic but Anti sounds like it is opposing or in competition
with. This seems to me to be a _complementary_ service for researchers. Not
anti anything, in the same way that a hammer is not anti-chisel.

