Author Archives: Diane Workman

Oxford Reference, or how to find “answers with authority”

Oxford Reference logoWhere do you turn to when you need to quickly check a fact and feel confident that the answer is accurate? What’s your first port of call when you need an overview of a particular topic, perhaps when embarking on an assignment or studying something unfamiliar?

The Library subscribes to Oxford Reference, a collection of over 250 high-quality reference books from Oxford University Press. Content ranges from quick reference books such as dictionaries and encyclopedias to more in-depth articles and essays, as epitomised by their excellent ‘Oxford Companions to…’ series. From Archaeology to Zoology, all subjects are catered for.

Below is a small selection of the trusted reference works that you can access, to give a flavour of the content:

  • A-Z of Plastic Surgery
  • A Dictionary of Abbreviations
  • A Dictionary of Forensic Science
  • A Dictionary of Opera Characters
  • A Guide to Countries of the World
  • Guide to Latin in International Law
  • New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary
  • The Oxford Companion to Cosmology
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang
  • Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
  • The Oxford Guide to the United States Government
  • Visual English Dictionary
  • Who’s Who in the Classical World
  • World Flags

Oxford Reference can be accessed via our Electronic Library (browse by resource type for ‘Reference resources’) or the library catalogue. Also, each individual title is listed on the library catalogue for easy discovery.

Oxford Reference provides quality, up-to-date, and fully cross-searchable reference content at the click of a button. Who needs Wikipedia?!

ARTstor Digital Library

ARTstor Digital Library logo

Did you know that the University Library has a subscription to ARTstor? ARTstor is a resource that provides over 1.6 million digital images in the arts, architecture, humanities and sciences. The collections include contributions from outstanding international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, artists and artists’ estates.

The project began in 2001, after the demise of the slide projector during the previous decade. ARTstor was founded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a shared, non-commercial repository of teaching and research images from the collections of hundreds of educational institutions. Collection highlights include images from the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, the Bodleian Library, and George Eastman House, to name but a few.

The images are high-resolution, and there are also software tools that make ARTstor valuable for teaching and research. For example, it’s possible to:

  • zoom in on and pan images
  • view 360˚ panoramas of world architecture using Quick Time Virtual Reality (QTVR)
  • organise images into groups
  • download images to PowerPoint for use in presentations
  • export the citations for images or image groups into referencing software such as EndNote

The wide range of images available, drawn from varied collections, means that ARTstor is a useful resource for students and academics from across many disciplines. So, whether you study art history or anthropology, Classics or politics, religion or literature, take a look at ARTstor – you might find something of interest there.

ARTstor is accessible via our Electronic Library and the library catalogue. Don’t forget that if you need help using this resource or any other library resources then your Subject Librarian will be happy to help. Find out more on our Subject Guides page.