Reference Publisher News
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
There’s so much going on in reference publishing (on the electronic side, I mean) that it’s hard to keep up. A spare hour or so rushing through the great bazaar that is the ALA Annual Conference exhibits barely scratches the surface. Here are are few things I saw. There are many others I missed.
At the Oxford booth, I got a demo of Oxford Bibliographies Online, a collection of guides to the essential literature in disciplines in sciences and humanities. Each subject will launch with 50-100 peer-reviewed entries (“equivalent to a 4-volume print encyclopedia”) and will include specially-commissioned text and annotations as well as bibliographic citations. The first four subjects, Classics, Islamic Studies, Social Work, and Criminology, will be available this winter.
Over at the ProQuest booth I got a look at the new SIRS Issues Researcher. ProQuest also has a new platform, which Reference Books Bulletin will be covering in more detail in the fall.
At Gale there were several new databases, including the timely Career Transitions and an online version of the classic Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia (take a look at the video).
WilsonWeb has some new features like a ReadSpeaker (text-to-speech) converter and article and interface language translations. I didn’t get a chance to look at these during the conference, but I’m going to try them out as soon as I get a chance.
