The Monograph Solution

For 2-1/2 years now, Oxford University Press has been catering to the needs of academic librarians on a budget with “a browsable database that contains the complete texts of more than 1,000 Oxford monographs, in four areas: economics and finance, political science, philosophy, and religion. As a result, participating institutions no longer have to shell out for print copies of Oxford titles in order to make them available to faculty members and students.” For cash-strapped university libraries, the program is a godsend, and far from hurting print sales of the monographs, the easy and cheap availability of the database appears actually to have stimulated interest.