Oxford's vote of confidence in internet subscription services

Citation

Swarbrick, D. (2002), "Oxford's vote of confidence in internet subscription services", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 19 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2002.23919daf.002

Oxford's vote of confidence in internet subscription services

David Swarbrick

"A giant reference work which dwarfs any book in history will start to take shape in March 2002, in a project seen as a vote of confidence in paid-for services on the Internet," announced the British newspaper, the Guardian, on 5 January 2002. The reference work in question is Oxford Reference Online, which launches in March 2002. It is the first step in a project that will one day encompass up to 300 Oxford dictionaries, mini-encyclopaedias, Companions, and other major reference works, on subjects from military history to food, in a subscription Web site that could total around 130 million words.

Paid-for services have taken a huge battering in the stock markets during the last two years. "You can't make money out of the Internet" is the popular wisdom. So why is Oxford University Press continuing to invest heavily in subscription services such as the Oxford English Dictionary Online launched in March 2000, Oxford Reference Online, and the enormous New Dictionary of National Biography due in 2004?

Part of the answer lies with the success of the Oxford English Dictionary Online – one of the world's biggest reference sites containing some 60 million words. It is not a question of the yearly subscriptions from libraries and institutions world-wide ever realistically covering the £35 million/$55 million that the 20-year project to revise the Oxford English Dictionary is costing, but the gross revenue of over £1m has covered the cost of putting the work online. It has also been a great hit with users.

Very careful planning, cost-effective marketing, and close to 100 per cent subscription renewals made the Oxford English Dictionary Online into a very real success story. The project to put the OED online revealed an important rule: ask before you invest. It might seem obvious, but the best way to give the customer a subscription product they want to renew is to ask them what they want in the first place, and then test it rigorously with users before setting up complex and costly sales, marketing, software and editorial structures.

In trying to decide how to provide greater access to Oxford's many single-volume reference works, market research was the key. More than any other product the Press has launched in decades, Oxford Reference Online is the child of its customers. Nearly ten rounds of market research were run over 24 months in the USA and the UK. Scores of librarians, academics, students, teachers, professionals, school children, and general library users were involved at difference stages.

Critically, different products were modelled. A literature reference product? Something on just Shakespeare? History? Languages only? In the end, the market research was unanimous. Users voted for a general reference product that incorporated many of Oxford's different reference works.

Having established the nature of the product, hundreds more hours of workshops, one-to-one interviews, e-mail research, and phone interviews followed. What sort of functionality was required? How should a quick search differ from advanced or browse? What could be added to Boolean to make advanced searching more flexible? Where should the search boxes be? How should the results be displayed, ranked, reordered or interrogated? How should different subjects be searched? How could a user conduct a search of, for example, "Mathematics and French", or "all sciences and superstitions?"

Out of the workshops emerged a product that was aggregated, but also modular, with every discipline having its own home page; where the identity and integrity of the original books was preserved – and yet could be pooled with others to allow for massive searches.

The research also established the central principles of access and payment. A subscription system emerged the clear favorite, but one which allowed for both unlimited access and concurrent usage pricing. Access had to be both on and off site, structured to permit users in through their IP address, through user name and password, or using their library card.

But perhaps the most important message to come across was simply that the market – in all its variety – wanted and expected the Press to dramatically improve the access it offered to its reference copyrights. If access was provided in the right way, and if the pricing was reasonable, potential buyers made it clear that the sale would be there. And that, more than any other argument, convinced Oxford that online delivery can not only pay its way, but also offer a dramatic new future to the traditional reference product.

In March 2002, the first part of the Oxford Reference Online project unfolds. Oxford University Press will publish its core language and subject reference dictionaries online for the first time. Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection will make 1.5 million dictionary definitions, facts, figures, people, places, sayings, and dates available from 100 of Oxford's central English and bilingual dictionaries, usage, quotations, and subject reference books all combined to create one integrated knowledge resource. And to take the pain out of keeping this new online reference collection up to date, the service will be regularly updated from Oxford's extensive programme of new editions of works on core subjects. New works will be added too – statistics, tourism, and sport are just three of the subjects expected to make an appearance soon.

The product may sound simple, but preparing Oxford Reference Online: The Core Collection, has been a huge task that has taken months of planning and execution – which continues as this piece is being composed in February 2002. The first major hurdle was the digitization of nearly 40 million words, and the complex and extensive restructuring and tagging of the 1.5 million entries from the first 100 chosen texts. From "Aalenian" in the Dictionary of Earth Sciences to "ZZ Ceti star" in the Dictionary of Astronomy, material equivalent to over 60,000 book pages is currently being turned into more than more 500Mb of data, each part of it crafted to an elaborate tagging specification to enable high-quality searching.

Finding the right technical partner to deliver what users wanted was imperative. Semantico, the Brighton, UK-based online reference developer, has a worldwide reputation for being at the forefront of online design and delivery. The technology used to integrate millions of entries from different works is extraordinarily challenging and complex, but Semantico's job has been to ensure that it is never apparent to users who want just two things – speed and clarity. And part of the brief was a design that is simple and jargon free, with no advertisements, no fussy graphics, and no distractions!

Just two months away from launch, more than £1 million has been spent, and already 300 institutions have signed up for free trials of the site, with hundreds more academic, corporate, and specialist libraries, schools, colleges, universities, businesses, and government offices – from San Francisco to Sydney – being approached with information. The signs are good. But why not try it? Visit the ORO Web site at: www.oxford reference.com and see it for yourself.

David Swarbrick(swarbrid@oup.co.uk) is Project Director of Oxford Reference Online and Marketing Director for Oxford University Press's Dictionary, Trade, and Reference list in the UK.