ACCESS

The concept of access to information has evolved, as Borgman (2000, 79) shows, from the varied areas such as library system, telecommunication system and so on. According to her (Borgman 2000, 57), access to information is a process, through which the user is able to retrieve the information s/he seeks from the internetwork of computers provided that,

i. The user has the basic technical knowledge and skills,

ii. The technology is viable,

iii. The information is relevant and usable.

The whole process of access to digital libraries is dependent on these three factors: the knowledgeable user, technology and nature and quality of data. In other words, the user should have a minimum level of technical knowledge for better access in terms of quality of the retrieved data. Now, since I recognise teachers and students of English literature as the readers, I will discuss the search methods briefly.

Generally speaking, we come to across the following information models with the digital libraries on the internet:

• Boolean Model

• The Vector Space Model

• The Probabilistic Model

• The Natural Language Processing Model

• The Hypertext Model

The first three models function by matching search terms with index terms to generate search results. “One of the major criticisms of them is”, as Chowdhury and Chowdhury point out (Gobinda Chowdhury and Sudatta Chowdhury, 2003), “that they look at individual search terms; they do not consider the search or index terms as part of a sentence or document.” That is why the last two models are put forward to tackle the limitation of the previous models.

Boolean Search Model

This search model is the oldest and functions in accordance with set theory and Boolean algebra. It operates by matching a set of search terms against a set of index terms. Multiple search terms are processed on the basis of logical product (AND logic), logical sum (OR logic) and logical difference (NOT logic). The processes of its functioning are described later in this chapter.

The Vector Space Model

This model is based on the calculation of binary weights. It functions by assigning non-binary weights to index terms in queries as well as in documents and computing the degree of similarity between each document in a collection and the query based on the weight of the terms. Thus a ranked list of output can be produced with items that fully as well as partially match the query. While this model produces a ranked list, the major weakness of this model lies in its assumption that index terms are mutually independent.

Probabilistic Model

Probabilistic models are based on the principles of probability theory. According to Answer.com, they “treat the process of document retrieval as a probabilistic inference. Similarities are computed as probabilities that a document is relevant for a given query. Probabilistic theorems like the Bayes' theorem are often used in these models.” (Answer.com)

The Natural Language Processing Model

This model (also known as computational linguistics) is an attempt at processing search items not simply in terms of keywords, but also in terms sentences, taking into consideration syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analyses. Webopedia defines it as “a branch of artificial intelligence that deals with analyzing, understanding and generating the languages that humans use naturally in order to interface with computers in both written and spoken contexts using natural human languages instead of computer languages” (Webopedia). In other words, it tries to make computer understand how human beings learn and use language.

The Hypertext Model

This model evolved as a system to overcome the limitations of the fixity and linearity of the conventional documents. It does so by putting in hyperlinks to other parts of a document (sentence, paragraph or the entire document on a local machine and to other domains and sub-domains on the web. The hyperlinks are made indexable and search able by search programmes. For the flexibility of this model it has played a major role in the designs of the websites and in the functioning of the internet. It should be noted that hypertext model has been largely instrumental in the making of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http).

It has been generally found that teachers and students search the web for resources just by using the major search engines and through certain keyword or phrases, which lead them to particular digital libraries and web resources. Since they are not familiar with the search techniques, they cannot get optimum access to the resources. Added to this is their deep-seated phobia of viruses and distrust of unknown sites. While the virus threat can be effectively minimised by using a good anti-virus software, better access can be achieved by being familiar with the ways the digital libraries and the web function.

Boolean Search

Boolean search employs special logic to produce search results. Without knowing its basic functions, a user cannot apply the logic to retrieve information in the digital environment. The search operators may vary with different libraries, but the basic function is very intuitive and simple. For instance, if a user applies the logical product (AND logic) and enters the search terms “Shakespeare and fool”, it will retrieve all those documents where both the terms appear. The second ‘OR logic’ “allows the user to combine two or more search terms in order to retrieve all those items that contains either one or all of the constituent terms” (p. 188) Following this the search terms “Shakespeare or Marlowe” will retrieve all those documents) i) where the term ‘Shakespeare’ occurs, ii) where the term ‘Marlowe’ occurs and iii) where both the terms occur. By using this logic, search broadens its scope. On the other hand, ‘NOT logic’ is used to restrict the search results to specific terms and exclude particular term. For instance, “Elizabethan dramatist not Marlowe” will retrieve all the records except Marlowe.

Truncation

Truncation sends signals to a search engines to retrieve the information relating to the different terms having the same common root. The user can perform this kind of search by placing operator like ‘*’ or ‘?’ (which may vary with different search engines) in the left hand side of a root, in the right hand side of a root or in the middle of a world. For instance, “*logy” will result in retrieve terms having ‘logy’ at the end like ‘philology’, ‘psychology’, ‘biology’ etc. Right-hand truncation like “philo*” will produce search results having the same characters in the beginning like ‘philosophy’, ‘philology’, ‘philomel’ etc. Similarly middle-truncation (humo*r) retrieves the terms matching characters (like ‘humour’ ‘humor’).

Proximity Search

This type of search is performed in order to specify the distance between two terms in the retrieved results. In principle, this is similar to the Boolean ‘AND’ search, but the difference is that it makes the search more restricted and more user’s query-oriented. The use of operators for this varies with different digital libraries. In the ACM digital library (http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm) the ‘NEAR’ is used to retrieve terms which will have close proximity to each other.

Field or Meta Tag Search

This search is performed when a user wants to restrict searches to more specific results. This is done by selecting an appropriate given field (area) before proceeding to search a particular item in the collection. This is called field or meta tag search because the fields in digital collections are specified by meta tags. For instance, in the “Advanced Search” wizard of the Project Gutenberg library, the user can restrict search results by selecting appropriate fields from ‘Language’, ‘Category’, ‘LoCC’ and ‘File Type’, where the items are expected to be found. In the Batleby library the user is given the option of choosing a particular field in “Select Search” option before performing a particular search.

Limiting Searches

A digital collection in a particular library may contain many items with similar index terms. In this a particular simple search may result in hundreds of retrieved items. In such cases, it is necessary to limit searches by choosing appropriate criteria such as language, year of publication, type of information, file type etc. This type of action is also useful in searching the entire web.

Free Digital Libraries

(The full material is available at www.rupkatha.com >>)

Generally speaking, the term “digital library” can be considered an umbrella term, which is used to designate a digital collection of texts, images, videos, softwares, which can be managed and accessed and used online by creators and users. But in the ‘Libraries’ page of the Florida State University, the definition of digital library is expanded to include “a series of activities that brings together collections, services, and people in support of the full life cycle of creation, dissemination, use, and preservation of data, information, and knowledge. The challenges and opportunities that motivate an advanced digital library research initiative are associated with this broad view of digital library environment” (Florida State University/Libraries). Another striking feature that we come across is, what Daniel Atkins has called, digital coherence. As Mary E. Brown explains, digital coherence means that “all the objects in a digital library, whether sounds, images, texts, or some other media, can be treated in essentially the same way... digital coherence is the mechanism which permits a form of equality among various information resources” (Mary E. Brown). However, the concept and practice of digital library have generated lot of ideas and disagreements, which are symptomatic of the digital environment. Stephen P. Harter has tried to classify some of those in an article “Scholarly Communication and the Digital Library: Problems and Issues”. We can say at this stage that digital library, just like the web, is expanding and evolving more and more user-friendly and application oriented.

The credit for the vision of digital library interestingly goes to a great 20th century English writer gifted with exceptional scientific imagination, H. G. Wells. Like many other visions that later on became a reality, in 1938 Wells conceived of a “world brain that could supplement, and add functionality to and even replace traditional libraries” (Brown). Similar idea was put forward by another visionary, Paul Otlet (1868-1944), the father of documentation and the creator of Universal Decimal Classification. Not many years after Wells’ fantasy, Vanncuver Bush, director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, presented his concept of memex machine in an article, “As We May Think” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. ‘Memex’ was conceived of as a system for creating and retrieving information from mechanical system based on microfilm technology.

In 1965—fifteen years after computers had been incorporated into the library services, J.C.R. Licklider, a researcher at MIT and Head of the US Department of Defence’s Information Processing Techniques Office, produced a seminal work, Libraries of the Future. In the book he argued in favour of research programmes necessary for a fully functional digital library. More importantly he spoke of a “network of ‘thinking centers’ that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval” (Licklider, 2003)

Despite these inspiring early visions, nothing significant and serious happened with the visions in the actual field until 1980. In the 1980s interests in digital library were revived again following the developments that took place in the fields of creating, presenting and preserving and accessing information in wholly new and more effective ways. The decade saw unprecedented developments in the computer and hardware sectors with great commercial successes. Clifford Lynch sums up the achievements in the field of digital library in the essay, “Where Do We Go from Here? The Next Decade for Digital Libraries”:

“Technologies like distributed search (for example, Z39.50) were well established by the late 1980s; it is easy today to forget Kahn and Cerf's seminal integrative paper "The Digital Library Project Volume 1: the World of Knowbots" was written in 1987-1988. Indeed, by the mid-1980s there were systems both in the commercial sector (consider Lexis-Nexis) and the research world (Bruce Schatz's Telesophy, for example) that might reasonably be considered digital libraries at least by some definitions. Very substantial digital library systems were developed prior to the World Wide Web.” (Lynch, 2005)

With equal pace, however, experiments were on and break-throughs were achieved with sending, sharing and accessing data over a network of many interconnected computers. In this credit goes to Tim Berners-Lee. In 1980, while working as a contractor in CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) he created a database software that could catalogue people and software models in CERN. By December of 1990, Berners-Lee, in collaboration with Robert Cailliau, had developed functional softwares to run the first web browser—WorldWideWeb, the web server and the first web pages declaring the Project. Cailliau (1995) recalled the event humorously:

“I was determined that the name should not yet again be taken from Greek mythology. Tim proposes "World-Wide Web". I like this very much, except that it is difficult to pronounce in French”

Here it must be clarified that fully functional digital libraries had been created long before the Internet and the Web; for instance, Project Gutenberg, Project Perseus, Ibiblio etc. Stephen P. Harter has summarised the developments for digital library in the following way:

In 1965, J. C. R. Licklider coined the phrase "library of the future" to refer to his vision of a fully computer-based library, and ten years later, F.W. Lancaster wrote of the soon-to-come "paperless library." About the same time Ted Nelson invented and named hypertext and hyperspace. He also analyzed some of the problems to be identified later in this paper in some detail, but never built an operational system. Many other terms have been coined to refer to the concept of a digitized library, including "electronic library," "virtual library," "library without walls," "bionic library," and others.” (Harter)

According to him and many others, the term “digital library” emerged as an accepted term after the foundation of the Digital Libraries Initiative, which received massive funds for researches on digital libraries.

What coincided and converged with the Internet is the fact that from 1994 onwards the huge amount of funds became available for research and it was taken for granted that true digital libraries can best be built up in the realm of the web. The difference in approach and attitude to digital library now was best reflected in the motto of the Digital Library Initiative (the biggest digital library research project): "the Initiative's focus is to dramatically advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and processing via communication networks." (Digital Library Initiative)

With the spread of the Web an exponential rate all over the world, the concept spread in the similar rate and high quality digital libraries popped up from the major countries of the world, including in India, with more effective and simpler search techniques.

While it must be said that the digital libraries have not proved as much useful as the physical libraries, they have certain facilities or flexibilities which may not be found with the physical libraries. Digital libraries offer the following conveniences for the users:

· Independence of Physical Location: The “information player”, to employ a new term, can attain independence from a physical location while logging on/in to a digital library. S/he can browse through and access the virtual libraries just from home provided that there is a computer with internet connection of modest speed.

· 24 ×7 Availability: As opposed to the conventional libraries, the digital libraries are available at any time unless some of them are down for maintenance.

• One Title for All: One of the major conveniences of digital texts is that one copy of title is enough for numerous users at the same time.
• Rich and Sophisticated Access: Digital libraries provide a rich and sophisticated access in terms of mobility of choices. In a user-friendly interface the user has the option of moving on from the catalogue to the text and to a particular chapter or from one library another in a minute. Using the optional search (word/s, title, author’s name or particular subject), the readers gets a glimpse of the collection in a very short time and even store the search results for future use. Even some digital libraries generously provide links to similar libraries.
• Instant Saving and Personalised Access: Digital libraries provide the option of instant saving of texts in the user’s computer, which can be used at anytime, and if saved as an online document, can be used by the user from any location.
• Low Cost: Access to a digital library is low-cost or even free-of-cost affair, though access to some of them is highly expensive.
• Institutional Independence: While physical libraries are themselves institutions, they have certain institutional norms, which sometimes restrict individual freedom of access and seem to generate inhibitions. Digital libraries do not exert any institutional pressure on the users.
• Multimedia Experience: Users can have some sort of multimedia experience on the web in a personalised manner.
• Learning is Fun: If the user is not addicted to the internet, learning can be a fun for him/her, as it provides a break from the traditional system of education.

Project Gutenberg

Main Website Address: http://www.gutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg originally started 1971 as a personal project by Michael Hart, who as a student in the University of Illinois, was allowed unlimited access to Xerox Sigma V, mainframe computer. Hart planned to "give back" the favour by doing something great in the service of mankind. So he decided to digitize and make available 10,000 most read books to the public by the end of the 20th century. That he was conscious of his project as an epoch-making event is evident from the title of the project, which seeks to relate itself with another epochal event that started with the introduction of movable printing machine by the fifteenth century German printer, Johannes Gutenberg. The first text that was to be digitized by Hart was United States’ Declaration of Independence.

With the rapid technological developments in computer science from the 1990s or so, many volunteers came forward to support the project actively and many organisations contributed financial assistance. Pietro Di Miceli, an Italian supporter, built the first website of the Gutenberg Project. When the Project went online, consciousness about it very grew rapidly and it went on to win a number of awards. Among many of its recent developments is its conscious decentralisation, which has been done, first of all, to avert server mishap and loss of data of a single location and secondly perhaps to spread the project worldwide. The project is now hosted in many countries on different servers.

According to the report in the Gutenberg site, till 15 April, 2008, the Project made 25,000 texts available online, and a “grand total of over 100,000 titles are available at Project Gutenberg Partners, Affiliates and Resources” (Project Gutenberg, 2008) The collection consists mainly of copy-right-expired e-tests of western literature: novels, poetry, short stories and dramas. Besides this, it also collects reference works, cookbooks and periodicals along with some audio files and music notation files. The e-texts are mainly produced in the English languages, but there are many titles in other languages like French, German, Finnish, Dutch and Spanish. The e-texts are available in many formats as the Project is aimed at reaching the widest possible readers and volunteers, “to bring eBooks to our readers in as many formats as our volunteers wish to make.”

As the sole mission of the project is “To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks”, it invites ‘volunteering’ in the following fields: “Distributed Proofreaders”, “Provide missing pages” and “Promote Project Gutenberg on your website”. Anybody can join the project and participate in making this global library richer.

Access: Accessing the e-materials of the library is very simple. The user can perform a simple search by using words against an author and a title. Advanced search option is also there where the user is required to provide as many search-terms as possible. It also offers the options of browsing the ‘Catalog’ and the ‘Bookshelf’.

Bartleby.com: Great Books Online

Website Address: www.bartleby.com

Bartleby.com: Great Books Online started as “personal research experiment” by Steven H. van Leeuwen in 1993 on the website of Columbia University. It was named “after the humble character of its namesake scrivener, or copyist” of Herman Melville’s short story as Leeuwen was inspired by the concluding line of the story: “Ah Bartleby, Ah Humanity”. The first book it published on the Web was Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In 1997 it was rechristened as "The New Bartleby Library" and moved to its own domain: www.bartleby.com and functioned as a non-profit organisation. But in December 1999 Bartleby.com incorporated with Steven van Leeuwen as the Chairman and CEO and with John Kibler as the Director.

The mission of the company now is to publish “the most up-to-date collection of reference works, as well as classic works of reference, fiction, nonfiction and verse—all free of charge for the home, classroom and desktop of each and every Internet user” (Bartleby.com). On one of the best user-friendly interfaces it offers a vast collection of full-text literary works on English and American literatures, classical Greek and Roman literary and philosophical and historical works and works of some of the best known modern European writers like Maupassant, Moliere, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Schiller, Turgeniv, Tolstoy and so on. Interestingly, it offers the The Bhagavad-Gita and the ‘Koran Chapters’ and Buddhist writings online. Besides, its collections of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, it also provides, in collaboration with the reference publishers like Columbia University Press and Houghton Mifflin, instant access to Columbia Encyclopedia (Sixth Edition), American Heritage Dictionary (Fourth Edition), Roget’s II: The New Thesaurus, American Heritage Book of English Usage, Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations, Bartlett’s Familiar Quatations, King James Bible, Oxford Shakespeare (the whole corpus) and so many other reference materials.

Access: The user-oriented special interface offers a variety of methods for searching the database. The user can browse categorically verse, fiction, non-fiction and reference, together with author, subject and title indexes. Again, it offers a special set of indexes to certain particular works, such as the King James Bible, the World Factbook and the Oxford Shakespeare. Even the user can browse through the cross-linked texts, which are provided chapter by chapter with the option of searching by key words between these works. In addition to all this, the homepage provides daily updates on particular a poem, a quotation, a biography and a definition.

The Oxford Text Archive

http://ota.ahds.ac.uk

Founded in 1976 by Lou Burnard, the Oxford Text Archive is a “repository of digital literary and linguistic resources for research and teaching” and functions “to identify, collect, and preserve high-quality, well-documented electronic texts and linguistic corpora, which it then makes available to others.” It is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, the Oxford University, the Arts & Humanities Research Board, Computing Services. Although access to certain texts is restricted, it offers huge resources on English literature with a spectrum of services to the end-users:

i. Access to an extensive collection of high-quality electronic texts, reference works, and linguistic corpora

ii. Expert advice on text preparation

iii. Professional documentation and cataloguing of texts

iv. Standardized encoding of core texts

v. Expert information on text availability

Not only this, the Archive offers a host of services to the “data creators and depositors”:

i. Archival and distribution management service

ii. Cataloguing and documentation of texts to recognized standards

iii. Long-term preservation of resources

iv. Usability across technological change:

v. Free promotion and publicity for scholarly resources

Anybody can deposit texts with this archive and may contact by email at ota@oucs.ox.ac.uk.

Access: The site offers the options of searching through the OPAC and through a customised Google search box. However, the user must write in his/her e-mail address before accessing a text. Once that is done, a link to download option is provided. Access to some texts is restricted, and those can be accessed by filling out a form and registering and sometimes contacting the depositors for permission.

Internet Archive

http://www.archive.org

Internet Archive was founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle as a non-profit organisation for “offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format” (Internet Archive, a). Kahle’s grand vision behind this project can be gauged from the slogan: "Universal Access to all Knowledge". Headquartered in the Presidio, a former US military base in San Francisco, the Internet archive has started to grow from late 1999 in gigantic pace to become the largest digital archive of the world. The digital library offers "snapshots of the World Wide Web", software, movies (118,299), live music concerts (49,548), audio recordings (258,882), and books (412,337). It offers forums for who can join it and get the virtual library card for accessing the resources and posting in the forums. As of 23 May, 2008 it has 594890 members.

To ensure massive access at a time and avert any accident, the archive is mirrored at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (http://www.bibalex.org) in Egypt. Internet Archive is a member of the Open Content Alliance (discussed later) and runs an open library which offers free access to 412,337 scanned copies of books (as of 17^th May, 2008). The collection is categorised under names of the contributing libraries: American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, Open Source Books, Project Gutenberg, Biodiversity Heritage Library, Children's Library, Additional Collections. It would have been convenient for users, had there been subject-wise categorisations. But the search options are powerful enough to retrieve any title from the collections.

Besides the open library service, it runs another programme Archive-It system which can be called a digital library of the entire web. As the FAQ declares,

“...(it) allows people to visit archived versions of Web sites. Visitors to the Wayback Machine can type in a URL, select a date range, and then begin surfing on an archived version of the Web... The Internet Archive Wayback Machine can make all of this possible.” (Internet Archive)

In the same way if any page or site has been removed from the web and the browser returns ‘404’ “Not Found” error, it may be possible to retrieve the page or site from the Machine through 85 billion” archived web pages. In order to do so, the user needs to log on to www.petabox.org and type the URL and perform search by selecting appropriate category. To store huge data over the net, the Wayback Machine (a special kind of server) was created by the Internet Archive staff originally “to safely store and process one petabyte (a million gigabytes) of information.” (Internet Archive, b)

However, using content from Alexa Internet (www.alexa.com), the Machine, which has 3 petabytes storage capacity, has archived “85 billion web pages” (Internet Archive, c) amounting to more than 2 petabytes of data.

Access: Access to the resources of this site (or the collection of sites) may seem at first difficult, but gradual familiarity makes it very simple and intuitive. The simple interface deceptively hides the huge resources, which can be retrieved (read online, copied or downloaded via FTP) by using the navigational hyperlinks and search options. Besides, simple keyword searches, it also offers elaborate advanced searches. The user can either access data as an anonymous user or register as a member by joining it.

The Perseus Project

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

The Perseus Project, created and maintained by the Department of Classics of Tufts University is a digital library offering primary (texts, 489 titles) and secondary (critical writings, 112 titles) resources on classical Greek and Latin writers and Renaissance English writers (mainly Marlowe and Shakespeare), Bolles Collection on the evolution of the city of London and other resources . Funded by a number of organisations like Digital Libraries Initiative Phase II, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services,, the project was begun in 1987 and went online in 1995 with the goal “to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible.” The project functions with the anticipation that “greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas.”

A common criticism against this library has been that it suffers from “frequent computer hardware problems, and as such its resources are often unavailable.” (Wikipedia) Recently, it has embarked on Perseus 4.0 phase with hardware and software upgrades for better access and service.

Access: Perseus offers 16 tools for browsing and accessing the resources like Art & Archaeology Browser, Atlas Tool Collection Viewer English Index. Besides these, it has a comprehensive search wizard, which offers categorical access to the resources.

The Camelot Project

http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm

Sponsored by the University of Rochester, this database is “designed to make available in electronic format a database of Arthurian texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information.” The project—designed by Alan Lupack, Director of the Robbins Library, and Barbara Tepa Lupack—started operation from 1995. It provides Arthurian texts produced right from Geoffrey of Monmouth till Tennyson. Not only this, certain lines the texts include links to paintings. The interface provides varied search options and links to other similar projects and scholarly resources. Under the menu “RELATED SCHOLARLY PROJECTS” the user can access other three sub-domains of the university with three similar projects and a database on medieval English poetry:

i. The Robin Hood Projects (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/rh/rhhome.stm)

It provides “in electronic format a database of texts, images, bibliographies, and basic information about the Robin Hood stories and other outlaw tales.”

ii. The Medieval Alexander Project (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/Alexander/alexhomepage.htm)

The purpose of this project (under construction) is to show to the representation of Alexander the Great in Medieval Literature and Culture.

iii. TEAMS Middle English Texts http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm

This is an attempt at making “available to teachers and students texts which occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but which have not been readily available in student editions.”

iv. The Cinderella Bibliography (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cinder/cinintr.htm)

This site tries to record the complex representations of Cinderella in literature, arts and popular culture.

The site also lists a number of projects done by the students of the university under the menu

“University of Rochester Student Projects”

Access: At the very first sight the search options seem very complicated; but once the user tries them, s/he gets very easily adapted to it. The first option “Search the Camelot Project” supports simple and advanced Boolean search. Besides this, it has three categorised options: Main Menu, Author Menu and Artist Menu. Under these menus, the site provides the options of entering various projects, resources and information through in-built customised search options.

Luminarium

Website Address: http://www.luminarium.org

This digital library also started as a personal project, more interestingly by a woman, Miss Aniina Jokinen, who—unlike many others sceptical and critical about the advent of the Web and the Internet— anticipated well their promise as a medium and means for English literature more than a decade ago. After creating a number of separate sites, she understood the need for uniting them under an umbrella organisation. The name ‘Luminarium’ was chosen, because she “wanted the site to be a beacon of light in the darkness”. Consistent with the creator’s dream of making "luminaries" of English literature available on the web, it offers a huge collection of works of the major writers under the four conventional categories: Medieval Literature, Renaissance Literature, 17^th Century Literature, Restoration & 18^th Century. Interestingly, this library has a collection of the writings of Elizabeth I. Besides these, the user can also find some resources on “Contemporary Women Writers” like Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, and links to “Irish Literature, Mythology, Folklore and Drama” at the bottom of the homepage. However, users can find more specific categorisations in pictorial headings on top of the site. The site not only provides the e-texts, but also offers illuminating essays on the authors, particular texts and specific topics from the texts, list of additional resources and discussion forums on certain authors.

This digital library is different from other libraries in that it tries to provide “multimedia experience in the periods”, with background music befitting a genre or an author or a text and with pictures of the authors and illustrations of literary themes by famous painters. The reader can also find resources on and links to representations of the authors and their texts on the television and the cinema. In fact, the interface of the site and author-specific pages are carefully designed to give some sort of experience of the times with the help of visual representations.

Access: Since the site depends mainly on OPACs, access to this library is very simple and easy. It presents links to the materials under well-organised headings and sub-headings. Sometimes a link may take the user to a different library, where the material is available. However, in the middle of the homepage, it offers a custom Google search option, using which the user can search either Luminarim or the web. Just under this, there is another option “What’s New at Luminarium”, using which the user can access the new updates and new additions and new announcements.

EServer.org: Accessible Writing

www.eserver.org

The EServer was founded in 1990—originally as “The English Server”, by a group of students on the network of Carnegie Mellon University for the purpose of communicating among themselves, and from 1991 it began functioning as a digital library providing free access to the resources via FTP, telnet and Gopher. Within a few years it established itself as a significant internet archive.

EServer.org is a user friendly digital library on varied topics relating to English literature such as— art/architecture, cultural logic, cultural theory, cyber/tech culture, drama, early modern culture, 18^th century, feminism, fiction, film and television, gender/sexuality, Marxist literary criticism, music and so on. It is clear from the description that the collections are varied and, it must be said, not comprehensive. But the EServer publishes seven scholarly journals.

Access: Access to this library is dependent on the links and hyperlinks provided on the home page and other pages.

The Labyrinth

http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/me/me.html

The Labyrinth is an excellent resource on Old English and Medieval periods. Sponsored by Georgetown University and hosted on the server of the University, it provides “organised access to electronic resources in medieval studies”. In addition to the electronic versions of the medieval texts of English literature, the user can find interesting information categorised as ‘Archaeology’, ‘Architecture’, ‘Armor’, ‘Byzantine’, ‘Cartography’, ‘Chivalry’, ‘Coins’, ‘Cookery’, ‘Cosmology’, ‘Crusades’, ‘Furniture’, ‘Gardens’, ‘Magic and Alchemy’, ‘Transportation’, ‘Travel’ and ‘Women’ to name a few.

In the same vertical link-menu, the user can find a link to “Old English”, which leads to a different page (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/library/oe/oe.html) dedicated to Old English literature. Major manuscripts and texts like Beowulf and Judith, The Junius Manuscript, The Exeter Book, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, The Laws of Alfred and Ine, The Runic texts (under development), The liturgical texts ( from the DILS Project) are available along with some reference works. Deborah Everhart and Martin Irvine are the Co-Directors of the project.

Access: As the website claims, “Labyrinth's easy-to-use menus and links provide connections to databases, services, texts, and images on other servers around the world.” The user can either navigate through links or perform simple and advanced search operations. It also provides option to search through Argos (http://argos.evansville.edu/), “a limited area search engine of resources pertaining to the ancient/medieval world (including the Labyrinth)”. Finally, the user can find at the bottom of every page, Ariadne’s thread (http://www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/info_labyrinth/ariadne.html), using which the reader can come back to the home page very easily.

The Romantic Circle

http://www.rc.umd.edu

The Romantic Circle is a “refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture.” Published by the University of Maryland and “supported, in part, by the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and the English Departments of Loyola University of Chicago and the University of Maryland”, it started offering free access to varied resources on Romanticism from 1996. The interface is designed in accordance with the name of the site and the resources are categorised in circles, featuring: About RC, Electronic Editions, RC Blog, Scholarly Resources, Pedagogies, Reviews, RC MOO.

The Romantic Circles Electronic Editions offers a searchable archive of texts of the Romantic era, enhanced by technology made possible in an online environment. Each edition is based on the highest scholarly standards and is peer-reviewed. The user can find some of the least known texts of the period long with some of the known texts, for instance,

i. The Fall of Robespierre by Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Robert Southey,

ii. The Temple of Nature by Erasmus Darwin

iii. Alroy by Benjamin Disraeli

iv. British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism edited by Orianne Smith

v. The Wanderings of Cain by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The site also offers online editions of 33 original critical works (edited volumes of esssays) on Romanticism. For instance, the reader may read Romanticism and Buddhism (February 2007), Romantic Gastronomies (January 2007), Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism (November 2006) Romanticism and Patriotism: Nation, Empire, Bodies, Rhetoric (May 2006) Digital Designs on Blake (Jan. 2005) Romantic Technologies: Visuality in the Romantic Era (Dec. 2005) Legacies of Paul de Man (May 2005) and many others. Under the section Pedagogies, this site offers free resources for teachers for Romantic studies in the classroom and under the section Scholarly Resources it provides “chronologies, indexes and other online tools for the study of Romanticism”. There is also a forum and

Access: The site offers a number of search options. The user can navigate through the OPAC or perform simple or advanced searches.

ILEJ: Internet Library of Early Journals

http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/

ILE started as a “joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford, conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme.” The aim was “to digitise substantial runs of 18^th and 19^th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data.” For this project six journals that ran for at least twenty years, were chosen:

Three 18th-century journals

· Gentleman's Magazine started in 1731

· The Annual Register started in 1758

· Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society started in 1660

Three 19th-century journals

• Notes and Queries started in 1849
• The Builder started in 1843
• Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine started in 1817

According to the statement: the six titles were chosen according to the following criteria:

• “perceived user demand in the United Kingdom higher education sector.
• wide subject range, covering science and technology as well as the arts.
• diversity of typefaces, print and paper quality.
• diversity of article formats and page size.
• use of illustrations (line-drawings and half-tones).
• availability of copies in the consortium libraries.”

The project finished in 1999, and “no additional material will be added.”

Access: Search options offered by the site are somewhat complex and patience must be your companion. It offers Boolean search (AND ad OR) for full text, author index and title index. Interestingly, it offers truncation facility (by using ‘*’). The user can search by typing in a word or phrase in one or both boxes and pressing the "Search" button.

The Online Books Page

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

The Online Books Page aims to facilitate “access to books that are freely readable over the Internet” and “to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all.” As of May 13, 2008, it boasts of possessing over 30,000 books on various subjects, including over 1800 titles from English literature. It was founded by John Mark Ockerbloom in 1993, when he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University with Web space and computing resources provided by the School of Computer Science. In 1999, it moved to University of Pennsylvania Libraries (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu). This digital library provides manifold services to the users under the following categories:

· An index of thousands of online books freely readable on the Internet (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/lists.html)

· Pointers to significant directories and archives of online texts (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html)

· Special exhibits of particularly interesting classes of online books (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/features.html )

· Information on how readers can help support the growth of online books (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/getinvolved.html)

Besides these, it provides under ‘Serials’ a list of freely accessible archives of internet resources such as magazines, journals, newspapers, and other periodicals.

(http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/serials.html )

The site is also involved with two other projects:

i. A Celebration of Women Writers (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women): Edited by Mary Mark Ockerbloom, this library digitises for users the works of women writers “throughout history” from 3000 B.C. to 20^th century from all over the world.

ii. Banned Books Online (http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html): It lists and digitises the books –ranging from Ulysses to Little Red Riding Hood— that have been the objects of censorship or censorship attempts. It has an interesting piece of writing ‘Books Suppressed or Censored by Legal Authorities’.

The site invites users to participate actively in enriching the resources and ensuring the quality.

Access: Access to the resources of this site depends on hyperlinks and OPACs. It provides also a simple search box in the ‘Authors’, ‘Titles’ and ‘Subjects’ categories.

Representative Poetry Online

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/display

Representative Poetry Online, version 3.0, offers, as of 3^rd May 2008, 3,162 English poems by about 524 poets from Caedmon to some of the works of the poets of our time. The database is designed on “Representative Poetry, established by Professor W. J. Alexander of University College, University of Toronto, in 1912, and used in the English Department at the University until the late 1960s.” It went online in 1994 (December, 15) with “a historical collection of some 730 poems by about 80 poets from Sir Thomas Wyatt to Algernon Charles Swinburne” (Representative Poetry Online). The electronic founder and editor since 1994 is Ian Lancashire, a member of the Department of English, University of Toronto.

The RPO functions as an extended sub-domain of the of the main University of Toronto English Library (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/), which has huge electronic resources on English literature, including texts and criticism; but access to the main library is reserved for the students and staff of the university. The RPO provides open access perhaps because of the fact that after the final edition of the book in 1967, “the Department chose not to continue editing or using Representative Poetry” as it was no longer necessary for the syllabus” and, that in ”1971 the University of Toronto Press then distributed the remaining copies of the last edition throughout the then Third World” (Representative Poetry Online).

Access: The interface of the site is, to some extent, difficult to grasp at first sight. Navigation depends on three horizontal rows of bars. The first row of bars is given for various search options: “Poet Index”, “Poem Index”, “Random” and “search”. The second row provides links to ‘Timeline’, ‘Calendar’, ‘Glossary’, ‘Criticism’ and ‘Bibliography’. The third row provides links to the resources on Canadian poetry. The user can make use of the keyword Boolean search (using ‘and’ and ‘or’). Another option “Corcordance search” is also there “to retrieve a display of all occurrences of a word or part of a word in the lines of poetry.”

4Literature

www.4literature.net

This digital library is “devoted to the reading, writing, and discussion of literature” with a collection of more than 2,000 books, stories, poems, plays, and religious and historical documents”. The collection includes Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali (Song Offerings). The collection is also available in CD-ROM, which can be purchased online for $19.99. The user can also participate by contributing essays and articles on free subscription basis. 4Literature is owned and maintained by Javatar LLC, a small company started by Jaret Wilson.

Access: Access to this digital library is dependent on author/title-wise OPACs.

Poetry Archives

http://www.emule.com/poetry

Poetry Archives provides “a simple interface into a dynamically generated, database driven website archiving thousands of copyright free poems” with the exception of translated poetry. As of May 1, 2008 it has significant works of 153 poets plus some other ones by anonymous poets, who are mainly from English literature. But this site contains some works of the classical poets—like Homer, Virgil, Pushkin and Whitman—which the students are expected to be familiar with. The user can switch over to “Printable View” option of the pages for printing and better reading.

Access: The user can access the works through the OPAC provided with the link at “Classic Poets”. There is also a search box option, “limited to just the title, author and first line of each poem”.

Absolute Shakespeare

www.absoluteshakespeare.com

Absolute Shakespeare offers the “essential resource for William Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, poems, quotes, biography and the legendary Globe Theatre.” On a very user friendly and simple interface, it provides the whole corpus of his writings—the plays, sonnets and poems, a biography, timeline of his career, information about the Globe Theatre, representation of Shakespeare in paintings and films, summaries of his plays, students’ study-guides to his major plays and lot more.

Access: Access is dependent mainly on the hyperlinks provided with the categories. However, there is a search option for key-word search.

Renascence editions

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/ren.htm

This digital library offers the e-texts of “works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799”. Different editors worked for the enrichment of the resources, and now the publisher and general editor is Risa Stephanie Bear. The site, however, displays a disclaimer that the editions are not intended for scholarly use.

Access: It provides alphabetical author-wise search and Google Search.

The Internet Classic Archive

http://classics.mit.edu/

This is an online repository of 441 works of classical writers, mainly Greco-Roman (some Chinese and Persian), like Homer, Aeschylus, Aesop, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Horace, Lucretius, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Plotinus, Virgil, Hesiod, Tacitus and more. This is created by Daniel C. Stevenson, Web Atomics.

Access: Alphabetical author-wise OPAC. The search does not function.

Bibliomania

http://www.bibliomania.com

The site offers more than 2,000 free classic texts, study guides plus research works in HTML format. It is now kept alive by ex-employees of Bibliomania.com Ltd, which stopped functioning.

Access: It has simple search, ‘+/and’ search, title/author-wise search options.

Literature.org: The Online Literature Library

http://www.literature.org

Maintained by volunteers and sponsored by Knowledge Matters Ltd the site offers “Classic works of English literature. Fiction from authors like Lewis Carroll, the Bronte sisters (Anne, Charlotte and Emily), Jack London, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens and many others, and classic scientific works from Charles Darwin and Rene Descartes.”