Reference at Newman Library

New Names for Oxford Art Online and Oxford Music Online

The A-Z database list now features  renamed links that reflect the product branding in the interface and the actual content that we have access to:

  • Grove Art Online
  • Grove Music Online

Until the end of the year, pointer database links will also be found in our A-Z database list for “Oxford Art Online” and “Oxford Music Online” that redirect to the URLs used for the respective Grove databases.

Please note that on the Grove Art Online database, there is a link back to the larger “Oxford Art Online” platform that features content we don’t have access to, notably the Benezit Dictionary of Artists.

New Database: Very Short Introductions

After a successful trial earlier this year with Very Short Introductions (from Oxford University Press), we were able to purchase one of the five collections (social sciences), which includes 100 books in the following subject areas: anthropology; business and management; criminology and criminal justice; economics; education; environment; human geography; politics; research and information; social work; sociology; and warfare and defense. Some of the books might be useful for faculty looking for textbooks or shorter course readings.

Records for each book should be discoverable in OneSearch in the next week or so. In the meanwhile, you can find a link to Very Short Introductions on the A-Z databases page and on the Ebooks – Databases page. If you’d like to browse the list of social sciences books we have access to, this link should work.

New URLs for All Oxford Products

This morning, I updated all the URLs to Oxford resources on our A-Z list:

  • Oxford Art Online (contains the Grove Dictionary of Art)
  • Oxford English Dictionary
  • Oxford Handbooks  Online (we only subscribe to some of the content)
  • Oxford Music Online (includes Grove Dictionary of Music)
  • Oxford Reference
  • Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication

If you encounter any issues connecting to these resources, please let me know.

This update from Oxford of URLs from HTTP to HTTPS is yet another example of a trend we’ve been seeing from our vendors over the past few years as they respond to larger movements in the web world to design more secure environments. Developers of web browsers have been adding more features to alert users to websites that use the less secure HTTP protocol and restricting some functionality only to sites that use HTTPS. At the same time, search engines have been tinkering with ranking algorithms to reward HTTPS-enabled sites and deprecate ones still using HTTP.