For Future Reference

Hot off the Oxford University Press come three new resources that have databasers buzzing. Oxford Music Online (OMO) acts as a gateway through which Oxford's various music reference sources can be accessed interactively. OMO includes the already popular Grove Music Online, which offers the monstrous New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and other multivolume print works in full text as well as music reference standards (The Oxford Companion to Music sound familiar?). It also includes the ever comprehensive Encyclopedia of Popular Music, another print standard that was first published online this past fall. Each resource will still be available independently, but the OMO allows for cross-searching among all of these resources.

Oxford Art Online (OAO) follows a similar structure, offering access to the popular Grove Art Online (including the 34-volume Dictionary of Art) and other art reference titles, and will include 500 new modern and contemporary art images and more than 2000 additional color images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Art Images for College Teaching.

Finally, Electronic Enlightenment features cross-searchable online access to over 75,000 letters from more than 6500 philosophers, scientists, writers, politicians, and other great thinkers from the 18th century. With original-language editions in French, German, and Italian, more than 200,000 scholarly annotations, and enhanced thematic-searching capabilities, this database will surely give patrons from scholars to history buffs something to write home about.

Academics, take note: Crossroads, a new online community for scholars from Readex, allows users to annotate, bookmark, and provide commentary on all sorts of digitized materials. According to Vice President for New Product Development Remmell Nunn, "Researchers will be able to participate in an archived and fully attributed scholarly debate, and teachers will be able to create innovative courses and even multi-institutional projects."

EBSCOhost's Associated Programs Source (APS) and Associated Programs Source Plus (APSP) are two new exciting online resources designed specifically for two-year community colleges. As EBSCOhost has also recently unveiled two new interfaces (designed in house!) and such improved searching tools as Visual Search, Enhanced Clustering, and Image QuickView for its products, APS and APSP users should enjoy improved navigation right from the start.

Librarians fortunate enough to own the five-volume Magill's Medical Guide nearby in times of need will certainly appreciate Salem Press' new database, Salem Health, which offers full-text access to all 3500 Magill's pages and will be incorporating other Salem health titles (including Salem Health: Cancer and Salem Health: Psychology and Mental Health) over the next few years.

The database is extremely user-friendly and offers extensive cross-referencing (many of them linked), advanced search options, and an extensive glossary. Access is free through December 2010 for those who purchase the Magill's set, so if you have that, you're probably feeling better already.