ACRL College & Research Libraries News

College & Research Libraries News

Internet Reviews

Sara Amato, editor

Sara Amato is automated systems librarian at Central Washington University; samato@tahoma.cwu.edu

Christian Science Monitor.Access:http:// www.csmonitor.com.

The Christian Science Monitor’s Web site is equal in quality to the newspaper. Renowned for frank, direct reporting, the newspaper covers national and international news from its own 13 news bureaus throughout the United States and other countries. The site offers the entire daily paper free and without registration. Narrow columns, large type, small color graphics, and clean, easy-to-read pages have earned it a number of prestigious Web awards. The Web Monitor does offer some features that the print cannot, such as the columns Cybercoverage, Links Library, and Email Forum (notes from foreign correspondents). By far the most important added feature is a searchable archive of full-text articles. Unfortunately, there is no mention of how far back the archive runs. There are three different searching tools to assist users: a dictionary (subject terms), “Related Words” (thesaurus), and a “Fuzzy Match” engine that forgives spelling or transliteration errors. Articles are archived in full with headline, byline, date, section, page, and text. Search terms are displayed in bold in the text of the retrieved articles. Although graphics are excluded, their captions remain.

Because the Web lends itself well to text archives, newspapers have been quick to develop sites that include searchable archives. Three papers with archives at their sites include the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post. The Boston Globe (http: //www.boston.com/globe/glohome.htm) maintains an archive of the past 15 years of staff-written stories. Searching is free but fees are levied for retrieved text. The content of the site includes the present and preceding day’s news. There is no indication of how much of the daily is posted on the site.

The Los Angeles Times (http://www. latimes.com) homepage also offers searchable archives (back to 1990); however, registration is necessary. Searching the archives and browsing the citation list are free, but displaying, printing, or downloading the text results in a charge.

The “Help with Archives” file states that the archives include “all news, feature and wire stories, editorials and letters published in the Home Edition of the newspaper.”

The Washington Post (http://www.washing tonpost.com) site offers the complete edition free of charge. Only a small amount of material is not online. The archives are free of charge and provide the full text, headline, byline, and citations to articles (including news wires) from the past 14 days. Archives back to 1986 are “coming soon.”

Two notable newspapers without archives at their Web site are the New York Times and USA Today.

The New York Times (http://www.nytimes. com) loads most of the national edition and is available “free for a limited time” to registered users. The site offers a number of navigational aids. Those who are familiar with the print edition will find the list of corresponding sections most helpful.

USA Today(http://wwww.usatoday.com) loads top headlines but it is unclear from the site how much of the paper is available on the Web.

It is probable that many other newspapers have archives accessible through their Web sites. Web catalogs such as Yahoo (http:// www.yahoo.com) list papers by place and/or subject for those needing papers with local or statewide coverage.—Kristina Anderson, University of Alabama, kanderso@gorgas.lib.ua.edu

Literature Online (Lion). Access:http:// lion.chadwyck.com.

This subscription site for English and American literature on the Web combines fully searchable texts with reference works, bibliographies, and catalogs on a single site, and provides hypertext links to relevant resources on other Web sites. The site is authored and edited by a team in the Chadwyck-Healey office in Cambridge, England. It was launched in December 1996 and includes nine full-text databases. Five are currently active, and the remaining three will become active later within a few months. Currently available full-text databases are: English Poetry, English Drama, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, American Poetry, and African-American Poetry. Soon to be available databases are: Early English Prose Fiction, Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare, and The Bible in English.

The site includes a Master Index, which is a comprehensive list of authors and works in Literature Online. It indexes more than 210,000 works in Chadwyck-Healey’s database, as well as thousands more on other Web sites.

The format is attractive and easy to use. Each screen contains large buttons for the following categories: Master Index, Literary Databases, Dictionaries, Reference Works, Web Resources, Help, and Home Page. By clicking on the Dictionaries and References buttons, the user can view Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, unabridged; Bibliography of American Literature (BAL); the King James Bible, “Authorized” version; and Periodicals Contents Index: Literature. The annual bibliography of English language and literature (ABELL) is available spring 1997.

Once full-text items have been found, users can choose to view the Contextual Table of Contents, the text only, or the location of the first hit of their search. Works are easily searched by author, title, keyword, genre, gender of author, and publication date. The longer full-text works are divided into sections or chapters, enabling the user to browse easily through the work.

Links to other Web resources are updated daily, and the editors are planning to have a poet in residence in the future, who will publish new poetry through Lion, write commentaries and essays on other poems in Lion, and run an online poetry workshop.

Literature Online is a useful and convenient Internet resource, but the cost may be a major selection factor. This is a subscription-based site and the separate databases are priced individually. The databases range in price from $150 to $3,000 per year for one concurrent user, depending on the database. For purchase information, send e-mail to: mktg@chadwyck.com.—Mary Wise, Central Washington University, wisem@tahoma.cwu. edu

New Zealand Digital Library Project. Access: http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/cgi-bin/ nzdlbeta/nzdlhome.

The New Zealand Digital Library (NDZL) is a phenomenon to watch even if the collections it houses don’t excite you. The site is managed by the University of Waikato Department of Computer Science and combines access to eight electronic collections with information related to digital libraries in general and to the NZDL project. The homepage is a clean, simple search engine interface which is the only point of entry to the collections. The “no browsing” approach is related to the purpose of the project: to build an electronic collection, develop an “automatic” access tool, and study the searching behavior of users.

As for the collections themselves, they are, as a group, quite appealing to the library and information science field: Computer Science Technical Reports, Computer Science German Technical Reports (MeDoc), Computists’ Communique, FAQ Archive, HCI Bibliography, Indigenous Peoples, Oxford Text Archive, and the Project Gutenberg collection. Information about each collection is available and is sufficient to introduce the content without overwhelming the user. The library also boasts a music library comprised of a melody index (indexed by the melody pattern rather than author or title) and a soon-to-be-available Optical Music Recognitions Service which allows the user to scan a piece of printed music and manipulate the electronic product.

The search engine is fairly simple with the capability of customizing a search (ranked or Boolean, proximity levels, etc.) to suit the user’s needs. Keyword is the only option available, so hits are of varying relevance even with a specific term. There is as yet no multiple-collection searching which would be helpful given the closely related content of most.

Links to other digital libraries and data about NZDL itself (bug reports, press releases, FAQs, etc.) provide information to those interested in digital libraries in a general sense. Links to search engines and miscellaneous digital library resources (follow the ETC link) such as D-LIB Magazine are also included, making the site as a whole a great resource for those who want to experience a digital library as well as find related material for further study. This being a work in progress, as is the Internet in general, the NZDL will be interesting to watch over a long period of time as new approaches and innovations are implemented.—Kirsten Tozer, Central Washington University, tozerz@tahoma.cwu.edu ■