OHO provides lengthy, in-depth review articles covering several broad subject areas written by leading scholars in their respective fields. The library currently has online access to those handbooks that have been published in the following seven subject areas; Business & Management, History, Literature, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology and Religion. Each of the broad subject areas has content from handbooks that have been published within each field. The handbooks are similar in type to subject specific encyclopedias. The entire set contains over 20,000 articles in over 530 handbooks that address the key points surrounding the past development, current situation and future outlook of each topic covered, as well as extensive bibliographies at the end of each essay. The library currently has 71 of the Oxford handbooks on our shelves in the form of print books, which typically range from 600-800 pages in length.
A user can either do a single search across all subject areas or just within one selected subject area. There is an advanced search option that enables one to search by specific fields, rather than full-text, such as; abstract, author, title, subject, bibliography and publication date. The results are sorted by relevance, but can also be sorted by title, author or publication date. All of the results are available in full-text. For instance, if you search for “Presidential elections” in the Political Science module, you will retrieve over 1000 full-text articles and 3 complete handbooks that relate to that topic. This resource is good for an extensive overview of any topic included in one of the seven subject areas mentioned above.
