Thank you, Oxford University Press.
The scholarly publisher has just launched what one magazine I’ve never heard of but is published by Conde Nast and so must be good calls “the anti-Google.” (I found the article via @evgenymorozov.)
They’ve hired (and made publicly available the list of) top scholars in disciplines across academia to produce Oxford Bibliographies Online, which generates actual real useful information, as opposed to cyber-noise or junk information. Ars Technica says:
The OBO tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library’s own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.
I’d tell you what I think of it, but I can’t get it to load, much vaunted East African fiber optic cable notwithstanding.
