Oxford Islamic Studies Online – Active
Posted by Deborah Vincelli on February 6th, 2012
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DECISION: Subscribe for 1 year with single-user access.
STATUS: trial through February 17th.
ACCESS: http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com
DESCRIPTION: Oxford Islamic Studies Online (OISO) offers unrivaled online access to the history and culture of Islam and provides full-text access to great Oxford reference and scholarly works, including The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, The Oxford History of Islam, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, two classic interpretations of the Qur’an, a Concordance of the Qur’an, What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam, and the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of the Islamic World (due to publish in 2008).
PRICE:
Oxford has a current sale on this resource with prices valid through March 30th.
Subscription Pricing:
-Single User Access: $950/year. Sale price is $712.50 for the first year.
-Unlimited Access: $1625/year. Sale price is $1218.75 for the first year.
Perpetual Access:
-Unlimited Access: $8125/year. Sale price is $6906.25 (this is a one-time charge).
-There is a 5% annual maintenance and platform fee. This is waived for the first year on a new purchase. The fee includes the following:
- Hosting of all content by OUP on the Oxford Islamic Studies Online platform, which includes advanced searching and browsing capabilities, deep cross-linking within content, and metadata tagging.
- With Perpetual Access, the museum owns the content. If at any time in the future, a decision is made to stop paying the annual platform and maintenance fee, the content will be delivered to us in a raw XML format.
OTHER:
- IP-authenticated
- Multiple simultaneous users
- Remote access allowed
- Usage statistics available
CONTACT:
Andrew Robbins-Pollack
Special Accounts Sales Representative
Institutional Sales Department
Oxford University Press, USA
andrew.robbinspollack@oup.com
Toll Free at 800-779-2871 or 919-677-0977 x5286
Fax 919-677-8877
Customer Support – Online Products
Oxford University Press
198 Madison Ave – 12th Floor
New York, NY 10016
oxfordonline@oup.com
Phone: 800.334.4249 ext. 6484
Fax: 212.726.6476
- 6 February, 2012 @ 16:38 by Deborah Vincelli
- 6 February, 2012 @ 13:59 by Deborah Vincelli
- 6 February, 2012 @ 13:59 by Deborah Vincelli
- 26 January, 2012 @ 12:01 by Deborah Vincelli
- 26 January, 2012 @ 11:59 [Autosave] by Deborah Vincelli
- 20 January, 2012 @ 14:20 by Deborah Vincelli
- 20 January, 2012 @ 14:08 by Deborah Vincelli
- 20 January, 2012 @ 14:01 by Deborah Vincelli
- 20 January, 2012 @ 13:34 by Deborah Vincelli
- 20 January, 2012 @ 13:31 by Deborah Vincelli
- 20 January, 2012 @ 13:29 by Deborah Vincelli
January 31st, 2012 at 4:34 pm
I think that Oxford Islamic Studies Online would be a good addition to our resources in the light of the new Islamic galleries at the MMA and the renewed general interest in things Islamic.
The content is taken from various Oxford dictionaries and encyclopedias (most of which, if not all, the libraries own in print) but the interface makes full use of online capabilities to search, organize, relate and link. Discovery is enabled by the interface.
Last year we acquired the Encyclopaedia of Islam online, which is quite scholarly but more like a scanned text as presented online. You almost have to have a background to know what and how to search. Oxford Islamic Studies is by comparison easier (more familiar?).
I hope the Islamic Department gives their opinion on this resource. From the point of view of more general research – for other curatorial departments who need occasional background, for those leading tours through the Islamic galleries or researching Islamic objects I think it’s an excellent resource.
A search for “carpet or rug” in Entry/Chapter Title yielded 18 results, 5 for carpet, 2 for prayer rugs and 11 for images. I think these provide a good overview. On the downside, most of the images are disappointing.
Also, this would be our third Islamic online resource after Index Islamicus and Encyclopaedia of Islam.
February 1st, 2012 at 10:55 am
It is difficult to know how useful this resource will be to our many different audiences. While it does have some art historical content, many of the sources are historical and contextual in scope, covering the broader field of Islamic studies. Having said that, Watson Library has the print versions of many of the online sources included in this resource, even those that are not strictly art historical in nature. For example, we have the 1995 edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, and the 1999 edition of The Oxford History of Islam. We also have The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture (2009), and an 1983 edition of A Concordance of the Qur’an, which is currently checked out. There may be some worthwhile savings in cancelling these print titles if we were to subscribe to the online resource.
Other sources in Oxford Islamic Studies Online include materials that might be appropriate for a general audience, such as The Islamic World: Past and Present, which is an accessible A-Z reference covering key people, events and concepts in Islamic history, and What Everyone Needs to Know About Islam. Nolen Library has a 2011 print edition of this latter source.
There are also a wide range of document types in Oxford Islamic Studies Online, including subject entries, biographies, chaptered works, primary sources, and images and maps. A search for mihrab will generate results across all document types.
Searching is straight-forward, with hit-term highlighting for easy scanning of your results. Print, email and cite options are obvious and easy to use. A nice feature is the ability to highlight any word in a text and search for it across the entire database by clicking on “Look it up” in the top menu bar. However, there are also aspects of the database interface that are clunky and slightly old fashioned. The range of functions is limited. For instance, there are no date sorting options for search results, and if you go deep into an article, you lose the ability to navigate back to your results. The images are fine but not excellent quality, and many of them are black-and-white.
What I do find useful is the Qur’an search, which allows users to conduct full-text searches within two English interpretations of the Qur’an, and to do a side-by-side comparison. The concordance search is also, I imagine, useful. The Timeline feature is interesting because one can compare Islamic events with world events. However, the Timelines are not presented in the most visually creative fashion.
While the interface of this database is familiar because it is an Oxford product, it doesn’t seem to work as seamlessly as Oxford Art Online. However, if the content is deemed relevant, then I don’t see these relatively minor interface issues as an obstacle to subscribing.