From Mac OSX Hints: Until 10.7 was released, the only English language options in the Dictionary utility were for US English. We've now got options for British English. There are now both the Oxford Dictionary of English 3rd edition © 2010 and the Oxford Thesaurus of English 2nd edition © 2006. It's not immediately obvious that more options exist due to the new scroll bar display. Open Dictionary (it lives in /Applications in case you didn't know) and select Dictionary » Preferences. Scroll down the list of options and enable the two British options. ...

From an article in the Telegraph: A team of 80 lexicographers has been working on the third edition of the OED – known as OED3 – for the past 21 years. The dictionary’s owner, Oxford University Press (OUP), said the impact of the internet means OED3 will probably appear only in electronic form. The most recent OED has existed online for more than a decade, where it receives two million hits a month from subscribers who pay an annual fee of £240. “The print dictionary market is just disappearing, it is falling away by tens of per cent a year,” Nigel Portwood, the chief...

From the Guardian: Widespread interest in last year's discovery of a hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold in Staffordshire has prompted Oxford University to embark on a mission to create the world's largest online archive about the period. The university is asking members of the public to upload any stories, poems, writing, art or songs they have composed or heard that relate to Old English and the Anglo-Saxons to Project Woruldhord (Old English for "world-hoard"). Oxford is also keen for translations of Anglo-Saxon texts, pictures and videos of Anglo-Saxon buildings or monuments, recordings of Old English, and even videos of historical re-enactments, to be...

I love dictionaries and wish I could subscribe to this personally, but it costs 40 pounds for a one year subscription and I don't think that is reasonable. This is from the press release: Oxford University Press is proud to announce its brand new modern English dictionary and language reference service, Oxford Dictionaries Online. Based on the largest language research program in the world, ODO gives users Oxford's largest modern English dictionaries, thesauruses, and usage guides at their fingertips. It is sure to become the go-to resource for business professionals, writers, copyeditors, linguists, academics, students, teachers, non-native speakers, wordies, and...

From a press release: Oxford University Press (OUP; www.oup.com) has launched the online version of the Oxford Textbook of Medicine. In print, this fifth edition of Oxford Textbook of Medicine is three volumes with just under 6,000 pages, compiled over 5 years by 750 contributors. One of the biggest benefits of moving online will be the ability to update content regularly based on clinical evidence, so physicians can be confident they're looking at the latest information. The Oxford Textbook of Medicine online is part of a growing number of online medical products from OUP. It features the full text, figures, and illustrations...

Every Friday I’ll post a listing of my favorite articles for the preceding week. Purely a subjective judgment. iPad Review: Getting started by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: Fictionwise/Barnes & Noble eReader, by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: Amazon Kindle Reader by Chris Meadows iPhone/iPad e-book app review: GoodReader by Chris Meadows Michael Tamblyn of Kobo talks about what he has learned Commentary on New Yorker piece on altruistic publishers and devil Bezos by Andrys Basten Shelved! Google Books–My Library (Library Guides Series: Technical) by Tony Bandy ODFToEPub coverts OpenOffice documents to EPub The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome now online iPhone/iPad e-book app review: iBooks...

From their press release: Oxford University Press (OUP; www.oup.com) has released the online edition of The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome (www.oxford-greecerome.com) in partnership with Semantico Ltd. (www.semantico.com), a provider of services and technology for online publishing. With more than 1,100 articles, the encyclopedia covers the legacy of the classical world and its interpretation and influence in subsequent centuries. The encyclopedia forms part of the Oxford Digital Reference Shelf (www.oxford-digitalreference.com), the online collection of Oxford's scholarly reference titles. The Oxford Digital Reference Shelf is a unique online publishing platform designed by Semantico, featuring a production interface built on the Semantico...

From an OUP press release: Oxford Bibliographies Online—a series of intuitive and easy-to-use “ultimate reading lists” is designed to help users navigate vast seas of information. OUP’s first online-only product goes beyond search algorithms to present bibliographies in several disciplines selected by leading subject experts and vetted by the highest professional standards. The result of extensive interviews with librarians, numerous focus groups and market research, Oxford Bibliographies Online extend a centuries-long mission of supporting excellence in research, scholarship and education. “Oxford could not have pulled a project of this scope and magnitude together without the exceptional cooperation of the hundreds of...

The Wall Street Journal has reprinted this section the Oxford work and it has some interesting history. Here's part of it: In July 1945 Vannevar Bush, a pioneering engineer in the development of analog computing, published an article in which he introduced the Memex: a hypothetical instrument to control the ever-accumulating body of scientific literature. He envisioned an active desk that performed as a storage and retrieval system. A Memex user would consult a book by tapping a code on a keyboard, bringing up the text. The Memex had many features that are now familiar components of e-books: pages, page...