Online Egyptological Bibliography (OEB) reaches a milestone

We are delighted to announce that over 150,000 references are now available in the OEB. This is a major milestone for this project, and the product of vital, ongoing international collaborations.

On 1 January 2009 the Griffith Institute in the Faculty of Oriental Studies took over the running of the Online Egyptological Bibliography (OEB: http://oeb.griffith.ox.ac.uk) from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. This transfer was made possible by a grant from the University’s John Fell Fund. At that time the website offered about 43,000 references to publications from between 1947 and 2002. Since then, three further databases have been integrated into the OEB. Coverage has been brought up to date—300 publications from 2020 are already included—as well as extended back to 1822, the date of the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and even beyond. The project is now a cooperation between Oxford and the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, who contributed the large Aigyptos database, and it is under the auspices of the International Association of Egyptologists.

The figure of 150,000 references available online, which was passed on 15 May 2020, more than trebles the core collection inherited from Leiden. Almost ninety-five percent of the material has been verified against original sources.

The OEB is a rare resource in the humanities, making comprehensive information about publications in a subject area available to scholars and students throughout the world.

During the Covid-19 crisis the OEB, which is normally a subscription-based service, is free to use, with the aim of increasing access for those who are having to work remotely.