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Swell Ceres now, for other Gods are shrinking, |
LITERATURE ONLINE LATEST
Apart from some rather nasty things like a free database of love poems
called Lionheart, LION has added much of value in the last year. Many of our
gripes about its software have not been addressed, and the site continues to
purr sporadically under the latest version of Netscape and hiss rather too
ofen under Internet Explorer. Java back/forward links seem still not to work
with any consistency, but we must learn to be patient and not expect to get
what we pay for. So this is just a report on the addition of various new
databases. Under the less useful reference section we now find the Cambridge
Encyclopedia and Biographical Encyclopedia. The Literary Databases, which is
where the real action is, now include Chadwyck-Healey's Editions and
Adaptations of Shakespeare (as reviewed in CD-ROM form by Colin Burrow in
Harvest, series 1). Although not new, we should also mention the
Eighteenth-Century Fiction collection (Swift, Richardson, Fielding all
covered, and Tristram Shandy (1760 London edition) has EVERY SINGLE PAGE,
squiggles, blank, black, and marble pages, reproduced photographically, so
hurrah for C-H's good taste). Works in progress and already available in
part include Nineteenth-Century Fiction and Twentieth-Century American
Poetry. And of course, many of the pre-existent databases continue to grow
and improve. So we still love LION: http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/
LION was first reviewed in Harvest Series II, now available in the Digest here.
OXFORD TEXT ARCHIVE
OTA has redesigned its site to improve its functionality and navigation, and
to make use of the SGML metadata already encoded with their texts, so that
what you see is now what you get. The old address has a link to the new
site, which is at: http://firth.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ota/public/index.shtml. OTA is in the process of putting free texts (remember, some are free, some
are free if you ask nicely, some cost, and some are very restricted indeed)
online, so rather than having, as before, to get by ftp a marked-up text
which you could not view, in future, we assume, you will be able to view it
in its glory within your browser, and then save it as html or plain text.
OTA is also in the process of making online texts searchable, that is,
Oxford is aiming to be the poor man's LION. We couldn't find anything that
was yet online, but the site is all there and ready for that day, and seems
well designed (links embedded within text are not always visible because of
the colour scheme, so just keep clicking at things).
The OTA was first reviewed in Harvest Series I, now available in the Digest here.
OCLC NOW HAS MLA BIBLIOGRAPHY!
Well, that says it all. The excellent, if rather over journalled and
under-bookish, MLA bibliography, previously available online to the lucky
few and to the rest of us on CD-ROM, is now to be had at OCLC FirstSearch.
There are various different URLs for either side of the big pond, but the
simplest to the basic homepage (follow links to FirstSearch) is
http://www.ref.oclc.org:2000/ or
http://www.ref.uk.oclc.org:3000/ (for the U.K.).
You still need a password, so if you know what you're doing, go direct to,
for example http://jake.prod.oclc.org:3057/html/fs_homepage.htm.
Enter your authorisation and password, follow links to the Arts and
Humanities Database area, and try out MLA online. Search criteria will be
familiar to users of the CD-ROM/telnet versions, but the web version is so
much better: records can be tagged and emailed, you can search for entries
under one heading and then follow links to other entries for particular
authors you approve of. Records seem to be displayed in reverse order of
addition, so you get the newest first and you can follow them down until you
recognise what you came up with last time you looked. Perfection, basically.
OCLC was first introduced eons ago; you can visit this intro in the Starter Guide here.
DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS ONLINE
MLA continues to include citations for Dissertation Abstracts International
entries, but you may wish to go straight to the horse's mouth (providing
your institution subscribes): http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/
Clearly UMI just don't care any more. Not only are they thinking the
unthinkable and preparing to digitise the 20,000+ microfilmed STC volumes,
but they are also doing the same with doctoral dissertations. You will be
shocked to discover that not only can you read and print off dissertation
abstracts, but for the most recent entries (and the most recent are
displayed first), you can add the dissertation to your shopping basket (just
as at any of the online bookshops, such as www.amazon.com or
www.bookshop.co.uk), go to the checkout, and for an even 50 dollars acquire
the right to download 15MB or so of digitised dissertation. You can then
print off a camera-ready, or perhaps oven-ready, text of the latest madcap
modern claptrap or promising scholarship. Extraordinary. You need a PDF
reader, but they tell you what that is and how to get it.
DAI leaves the UK well alone, and who can blame it? Fortunately, searchers for British dissertations are now almost equally well served by the Index to Theses website: http://www.theses.com/. Entries are displayed in no particular order, but as there are fewer, this is not yet a problem. A particularly silly feature is the fourfold discrimination 'quick search', 'simple search', 'standard search', 'advanced search' (the latter is encoded with such complicated logic that you need a Ph.D. in information analysis just to use it - very British), but the 'simple' and 'standard' do allow you to do interesting and useful things like searching by University and by title keywords using and/or.
And, a reminder that musicological theses are abstracted at: http://www.music.indiana.edu/ddm/.
ENGLISH SHORT TITLE CATALOGUE ON THE WEB
Which, as Richard Serjeantson observed in his review of the telnet version
(Harvest, series 1), should be English Long Title Catalogue. We have finally
got into the 'Eureka' web version, and can confirm that, alongside LION, it
is the best, most useful, and most seriously hardcore service yet available
to our kind of folk. And remember, it amalgamates STC, Wing, and the C18
STC, so you are no longer forced to pursue careers across the period
divides. As usual there are different addresses for different customers. Go
to http://eureka.thames.rlg.org/web/
and they will ask for your password. Go to your subscribing institution
(library homepage for example) from within its domain (xxx.edu or xxx.ac.uk,
etc.) and you may be able to pick up a link direct to a page which bypasses
security. The first thing to do is 'select a file', if you don't want to
search the RLIN Bibliographic File to which Eureka defaults. There are so
many to choose from (anthropology, architecture, art) it's like a sweetshop
for librarians. But choose ESTC, and when you get there, it's best to go
straight on to the advanced search screen.
Here you can do wonderful things, and all we can really do is tantalise you with a few hints. You can search by keyword, author, author word, title, title word, subject, subject word, imprint, imprint word, imprint year, imprint place, publication year, record ID, country of publication, genre, language, words from general notes, exact citation, words from citation, location words, and shelfmark. You can combine two criteria straightaway with 'and', 'or', 'and not', and when you press 'send' it will display a list in brief format of possible results (typically authors with the same surname either side of the one you were looking for). You then tick the one you want and 'send' again for another brief list of results. Tick any or all and you get the wonderfully rich ESTC entries with all their accumulated information about contents and individual copies. If you conduct a new search you can click on 'review' for a list of the searches you've done, and then merge them to get only those entries by author X published between 1640 and 1660 with a certain bookseller's name on the title page, or whatever.
Once you've got to the full record display you will see things highlighted which can lead to serious serendipity doodah. Click on the imprint line for a list of similar imprints, from the same printer AND stationer to their collaborations with others. Click on the author for the obvious, on the title for similar titles, on other names, or initials, involved for lists of their other entries, and on the generic descriptions for lists of similar works; some of the 'subject' headings seem bizarre or random, but if this is allowed for you will find yourself on a fruitful browse through the literature of vernacular prophecy or anti-catholic polemic. And at this stage the long titles are a great advantage as you stand a chance of understanding something of the contents from them, especially when they are supplemented by statements of what sort of a work this is, and what it contains. And keep browsing, for you will find much tucked away in the notes from reporting libraries, the sort of 'This is Love's Labour's Won reissued with a different title page' thing which librarians like to keep to themselves. You can 'export' full entries to yourself in various formats, but as none of these will look quite as nice as the screen in front of you, the best thing is to print the current file as well.
There are a few odd glitches which will sometimes not take you to a work you know exists when you enter its exact title, but more general searches (author plus title word) will get you there in more roundabout fashion. ESTC on the web makes possible all sorts of sophisticated searches in minutes which used to demand days of poring over, cross- referencing, and copying from, STC or Wing. And remember that the entries list the UMI call number, so you can go straight to the microfilm if (heaven forfend) you actually want to read the text. Wondrous.
NB Netscape 2.x, 3.x, or 4.x, or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 needed to access Eureka.
NICE LINKS
Carlo Bajetta has been busy surfing and has come up with a long and cultured
list of links to all sorts of necessary (and a few sorts of unnecessary)
places, some of which may be new to you. So if you don't trust us to tell
you what you need to know, have a look at:
http://www.unicatt.it/library/milano/BancheDati/surf2.htm
SIDNEY-L ARCHIVED
Archives of the Sidney-L e-mail discussion list are now available for
viewing and searching at http://info.uoguelph.ca/archives/sidney-l.html.
A reminder that the Sidney Journal website is just next door at
http://www.uoguelph.ca/englit/sidney
DANIEL'S DEFENCE OF RYME ONLINE
Samuel Daniel's greatest hit is now available courtesy of Richard Bear at
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ryme.html.
If you have never read this before read it now. This is one of CERES'
all-time favourite pieces of writing. We're sorry - that's just how it is.
SWEET 'N' LOW
The Shakespeare Society of the Low Countries has just opened its home- page
at http://shakespeare.let.ruu.nl/
The page is bilingual, Dutch and English, and includes tables of contents
for past issues of the Society's journal, Folio, and some Shakespearian
links. In the years to come, they are hoping to extend the site into a
useful resource for all scholars who are interested in Shakespeare studies
in general, and in Dutch and Flemish contributions to Shakespeare
scholarship, translations, performances and so on, in particular. Any
suggestions are welcome.
INTERNET PUBLIC LIBRARY: ONLINE LITERARY CRITICISM COLLECTION
The Online Literary Criticism Collection contains links to 1180 critical and
biographical websites about authors and their works that can be browsed by
author, by title, or by literary period. The Renaissance list is at:
http://www.ipl.org/cgi-bin/ref/litcrit/litcrit.out.pl?pd=British:+1500-1700.
It includes mention of familiar names like EMLS and Renaissance Forum and a
few self-contained articles on the web. A list of authors at the bottom
leads to a page of links to discussions of the author, and his or her works
are then cross-referenced separately. All structure and little content as
yet, but with time this could become a useful bookmark.
NEW ON ARDENNET
This month sees the publication, exclusive to ArdenNet, of research from
Eric Rasmussen and a team of graduate students purporting to shed new light
on the manuscript used to typeset and print the second quarto of Hamlet and
challenging the conventional belief that it was set from "foul papers".
Visit the Scholarship section for the full text of the paper. Additionally,
as usual, full listings of performances and recently released Shakespeare
books are available through the News and Reviews pages. Also included are
full details of Shakespeare Festivals throughout the United States and the
London Shakespeare's Globe Theatre season. ArdenNet is at
http://www.ardenshakespeare.com/ardennet/
SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609)
The Web Development Group of the University of Toronto Library has just
published an edition of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS (1609) edited by Hardy M. Cook
and Ian Lancashire as part of Renaissance Electronic Texts (RET 3.1).
Renaissance Electronic Texts is a "series of old-spelling, SGML- encoded
editions of early individual copies of English Renaissance books and
manuscripts, and of plain transcriptions of such works, published on the
World Wide Web as a free resource for students of the period", under the
general editorship of Ian Lancashire. The edition is at:
http://www.library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/ret/ret.html.
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For further information on CERES, please write to Gavin Alexander or Raphael Lyne.
This page is maintained by Andrew Zurcher, and was last updated on
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