Integrated and Aggregated Reference Services: The Automation of Drudgery

It has been obvious for some years that the web will become an extraordinarily powerful medium for electronic publishing. So it is surprising that most of the early innovators in web publishing have been amateurs and enthusiasts, usually with little or no interest in commercial development. Perhaps the best example of this is Paul Ginsparg's e-Print archives — an initiative that anticipated commercial publishers in the scientific journals field by years [1]. In the reference field we see the same pattern: scores of dictionaries appeared on the web long before publishers began to launch serious web reference services. In fact, some of the early innovations were from commercial publishers operating non-commercially, but in the spirit of other web pioneers. The Merriam-Webster dictionary is one of the best examples. It has been much used and has become a notable web landmark, but it is primarily a publicity and brand-building exercise for the publisher who has conceived and supported the service [2]. . The Merriam-Webster dictionary is not an isolated instance; hundreds of dictionaries have been placed on the web, either directly by their publishers, or by academics with the co-operation of an original publisher. One of the obstacles that has stood in the way of commercial publishers making a return from web distribution of their copyrights is that individual books are really too small to be worth developing into a dedicated web operation. Very large books such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Encyclopedia Britannica provide an exception to this rule, but few books are large enough to justify an annual subscription for online access.