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Reviewed by:
  • Oxford Scholarship Online
  • Stephen Henry
Oxford Scholarship Online. [New York, New York]: Oxford University Press, (2008–). http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/ (Accessed 10 October 2017). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection. Subscription and perpetual access purchases are available]

Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) provides full-text access to "over 13,000 outstanding academic books from Oxford University Press" (http://oxfordscholarship.com/page/about-oso/about, accessed 4 October 2017). The books are organized into twenty categories, including music. Oxford updates the collection three times a year. Institutions may subscribe to all of OSO or to individual subject areas or they may make outright purchases of individual titles, complete subject modules, or updates within subject modules.

Content

Oxford Scholarship Online presents scholarly monographs only. Specifically excluded are Oxford publications meant for general audiences, books in the Handbooks series (which are included in a separate resource, Oxford Handbooks Online), tertiary reference sources (some of which are included in Oxford Music Online), and Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music (an entity onto itself, available separately from Oxford at http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com). In addition, OSO is not to be confused with Oxford Bibliographies Online, which features online bibliographies on various topics.

Oxford Scholarship Online exists as a subset of Oxford's umbrella interface University Press Scholarship Online. Through University Press Scholarship Online, subscribers may add titles published by a growing number of "partner presses." Publishers with notable offerings in music include University of California Press (102 titles), University of Chicago Press (41 titles), University Press of Mississippi (38 titles), and Yale University Press (31 titles). University Press Scholarship Online and Oxford Scholarship Online users may elect to search within OSO, within any single partner press, or across all partner presses simultaneously. This review will focus on the content available through Oxford Scholarship Online, but comments on the interface and usability apply equally to University Press Scholar ship Online.

There are currently 509 titles in OSO's music subject category. The OSO music component was released in 2008; most titles date from that time or later, although Oxford has added several pre-2008 titles over time with the earliest being Martin Williams's Jazz Changes (1993). While not every scholarly monograph on music released since 2008 is represented in the resource, I found few conspicuous absences. As a way of assessing whether Oxford had included the most important music titles, I looked for the presence of books that had won major awards from the American Musico logical Society (AMS), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Society for Music Theory (SMT) since 2008.

All four of the Oxford publications that have won AMS's Otto Kinkeldey Award since 2008 are available in OSO. [End Page 480] In addition, Oxford has included Jane A. Bernstein's, 1998 work Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539–1572). Furthermore, two Oxford titles currently nominated for the 2017 Otto Kinkeldey Award—Kofi V. Agawu's The African Imagination in Music and Michael Marissen's Bach & God (both 2016)—are also included.

Award winning Oxford books in the field of ethnomusicology are similarly well represented, albeit not comprehensively. Four of the five Oxford titles published since 2008 that have won the SEM's Alan Merriam Prize are in OSO, the exception being Carol Silverman's Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (2012). I was unable to determine why Silverman's book had been excluded, but it is an obvious candidate for inclusion.

Unfortunately, the field of music theory does not fare as well. The Society for Music Theory has awarded its Wallace Berry Award to four Oxford books since 2008 and only one of them is in OSO: Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis's On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2013). Absent from the collection are Giorgio Sanguinetti's The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice (2012); Janet Schmalfeldt's In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (2011); and Danuta Mirka's Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791 (2009). It is not clear whether these titles have been excluded for content or for licensing...

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