The Ultimate Anthology: Literature Online

-"Of writing many books there is no end"

Anthony Vaver
Humanities Librarian

The truth of this epigraph can pose real hurdles for the literary researcher. With all that has been written over the centuries, how does one track historically and identify works that express a specific theme? How can one find a copy of a little-known work that long ago fell out of the canon? And how can one discover who initially wrote an unidentified quotation, like the one cited above?

Help with these questions is now available. The Brandeis University Libraries has recently added Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online to its collection of electronic resources. This mammoth collection of databases contains over 300,000 works of English and American literature, including poetry, drama, the Bible in numerous editions, early English prose, Shakespeare editions, and 18th century fiction. In addition, Literature Online has literature-related reference works, a "Writer-in-Residence" feature that offers online writing workshops and discussion groups, and links to electronic texts and other relevant sites on the World Wide Web.

The heart of Literature Online is its collection of literary databases, like The English Poetry Full-Text Database, the Database of African-American Poetry, 1760-1900, and Early English Prose Fiction. Researchers can search for words and phrases not only within each individual database, but across all of the databases as well. With this searching power, researchers can quickly identify literary themes and patterns that heretofore would have gone unnoticed.

The selection of works for each database is based upon an established bibliography, like the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL), which served as the basis for the English Poetry database. However, new works are continually added to each database. For the most part, the databases offer standard canonical works along with more obscure ones, making hard-to-find literary works readily available.

The creation of these large databases has posed some complicated copyright issues. Many of the first databases created by Chadwyck-Healey end at around 1900, due to the difficulty of securing the rights to more recent works that are not in the public domain. But even 10% of English Poetry, the very first database produced, contains copyrighted material, mostly early works recently published from manuscript sources. Publishers, however, have recently been more forthcoming in granting permission for electronic conversion of their printed material. Consequently, databases that cover twentieth-century literature have begun to appear in Literature Online.

Every work included in a database is manually converted to machine-readable form. No OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is used to scan the texts, because the error rate for this conversion method is too high. Every work is keyed in twice, various programs are run to compare the two versions and check for accuracy, and then further manual proof-reading is performed. Any stray errors that manage to slip through this process can easily be corrected, since the Literature Online databases are served over the Web rather than being permanently stored on a CD-ROM.

By bringing together in one place hundreds of thousands of literary works, Literature Online is a valuable tool for anyone doing literary research. It can be found on the Brandeis University Libraries "Electronic Databases" Web page by clicking on "L." And the author of the epigraph? It is the opening line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh." But you could have easily discovered this information with Literature Online.