Oxford University Press launches the Anti-Google | Hacker News Reader

Oxford University Press launches the Anti-Google

arstechnica.com

21 pointsglymor11 comments

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.

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.

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

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.

What about Google Scholar?

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.

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

And non-free.

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

Worse here.

"The connection was reset

"The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading.

"The site could be temporarily unavailable or too busy. Try again in a few moments."

Not ready to pay a subscription fee for yet, methinks.

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.

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