illuminea | FEATURE
THE PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE OF OXFORD MEDICINE ONLINE IN THE LAST TWO YEARS, OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS’S PROGRAMME OF DELIVERING MEDICAL CONTENT ONLINE HAS DEVELOPED APACE. HERE, WE TRACK PROGRESS FROM THE EARLY DECISIONS THROUGH THE CURRENT CONTENT ON OFFER TO LOOK AHEAD AT OUR PLANS FOR THE NEXT TWO YEARS. Alison Bowker, Head of Marketing for Law and Medicine, OUP
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trategy
The strength and depth of our content, allied with the OUP brand, is the platform on which the online strategy is being built. In print, titles like the Oxford Textbook of Medicine and the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine are known and respected around the world, and are cornerstones for the rest of our publishing. We wanted to build on this strength in the print world by providing the content we knew people wanted, in the format they wanted. The key difference from the past decade was that the delivery would be on an OUPbranded publishing platform, which would enable us to make the most of our strong reputation, and deliver a product which
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clearly reflected the values of OUP: authority, excellence, and innovation.
Basic concepts Being able to start with a clean slate offered us the opportunity to think carefully about how to structure our content in the most logical way for users. The starting point was a belief that, as far as possible, the majority of Oxford’s medical book content should be presented on one platform, with a standard suite of functionality and a common page layout and design. This enables users to navigate around a potentially vast content set with ease. After this, the design and production values common to our print products led us to a modern, fresh, and uncluttered site design,
with clear and easy navigation. From this base, we are already layering additional features like multimedia. As the site is used more and more, user behaviour will guide improvements to elements such as navigation, functionality, and design.
Early steps The first titles became available online in May 2009; a set of 12 titles from the Oxford Medical Handbooks series. This pilot was designed to gather user feedback and to work through the online product development process on a small scale, before tackling larger sets of content. It proved there was demand for our medical content online and also gave us pointers on design and layout, among other things.
Bigger leaps Through the next two major projects we learnt how to deal with some different challenges. Firstly,
the Oxford Textbook of Medicine online launch in May 2010 enabled us to work through the process of putting a major textbook online – it has over 600 chapters and 2,500 images. A separate set of challenges were posed by the upload of around 70 titles in the Oxford Medical Handbooks, Oxford Handbooks in Nursing and Emergencies In series – in this case it was the sheer volume of data capture, development, and testing. Both these projects stand us in very good stead for an increase in the speed of loading titles, which is our next area of focus.
Oxford Medicine Online portal Alongside the Handbooks upload, we built the Oxford Medicine Online portal at www.oxfordmedicine.com. The portal functions as a single access point for both searching across all the titles and browsing by subject, series, and career stage. There are also links to Oxford services which cannot yet be integrated, such as