[Kathleen DeLaurenti]

Today, Oxford migrated the Grove family of resources to a new platform.

There are significant issues with the platform. Original resource designations have been removed and family entries are difficult to navigate. Relevance in search results now makes it even harder to find the most robust biographical article without searching through many pages of results and clicking through to review content.

Response from Oxford claims that they\’ve removed source information to unify the database as one resource, but they\’ve failed to integrate articles, and depending on where they originated and when, you now may find a number of broad, general articles before getting to the better content in the resource.

In addition, I\’ve known many authors of Grove articles voice frustrations over the slow response to requests to update articles.

My institution cannot even afford to have more than 5 simultaneous users of the site. Ultimately, I wonder if this is the best platform for us to continue investing money and labor into as the authoritative music resource. Is it time to think about leveraging new technology and opportunities to move to the next great music resource?

I very much welcome thoughts from scholars, students, and librarians on this topic.

 

Best,

 

Kathleen DeLaurenti

Peabody Institute

 

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