Biblio-Notes

Editor: Scott Stebelman

Gelman Library

George Washington University

Washington, D.C. 20052

202-994-1342

Chair, 1999-2000: Catherine A. Larson

University of Arizona Library

1510 E. University

Tucson, AZ 85745

520-621-4926

Chair, 2000-2001: William Wortman

280 King Library

Miami University

Oxford, OH 45056

513-529-1745

Contents

• News from the Chair
• EALS Program Report: Reading the South
• Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare--A Reply to Professor
  Gail Kern Paster
• English Department Web Sites with Links to Resources
• EALSL and Related ALA Resources

News from the Chair

The beginning of a new (ACRL) presidential term, and soon, the beginning of a new year
and a new century, are excellent times to reflect, refresh and renew. And what better
way to celebrate a new century (albeit a bit early) than through a revelry in fiction?
Fiction truly is alive and well! Join your colleagues at ALA's Annual Conference 2000 in
Chicago for a revitalizing program on "Collecting Contemporary Fiction for the New
Millennium." As librarians, we encounter bewildering choices in building our
collections. Selecting from among new authors, Third World authors, small press
publications, gay materials, genre and popular fiction, and now, electronic texts, poses
an array of difficult choices. Some of the questions that will be addressed in our
program include:

• How are academic libraries using approval plans effectively for collecting
  contemporary fiction?
• What role are small press materials playing in the curricula?
• What is the role of weeding in a collection of contemporary fiction?
• How are librarians collaborating successfully with faculty in this arena?

Each ACRL President is invited to set his or her own theme for the presidential term.
"Celebrating Our Successes, Confronting Our Challenges: ACRL Enters the 21st Century" is
the theme set by Larry Hardesty, current ACRL president. As President, he is deeply
interested in recruiting new members: a continuing challenge to any non-profit,
professional organization. Our section can certainly play a role through attracting
members to our own corner of ACRL. If you know a new librarian working in the field of
English or American literatures, please take a moment to reach out and let them know
about EALS. It's well worth your time.

Cathy Larson, Chair
EALS

EALS Program Report: Reading the South

Reading the South, the 1999 program of the ACRL English and American Literature Section,
featured award-winning author Ellen Douglas. Douglas read from her most recent book,
Truth: Four Stories I’m Finally Old Enough to Tell, a collection of
memoirs in the form of stories. She believes novelists are regional because they write
about what they know. "Southern" literature was recognized after Faulkner became
popular. In her opinion, Faulkner "wrote everything there is to say about the South" and
echoes of his "southerness" are found in today’s literature.

Ralph Adamo, poet and editor of The New Orleans Review, argued that people view
southerners as the stereotypes that pervade the media. Many different kinds of people
live in the South and all southern writers do not sound like Faulkner. The concept of
"southerness" is a marketing ploy. Language, Adamo believes, rather than region, is the
major influence on modern writers because globalization has diminished the importance of
geographic boundaries.

Rob Melton, University of Kansas Bibliographer, discussed the history of southern
literature collections in libraries, especially manuscripts. "Southerness" as a
collection specialty did not gain notice until the 20th century, although large academic
libraries held works of authors from their state. Jeanne Pavy from the University of New
Orleans Library described works about southern literature from Living Writers of the
South (1869) to Southern Black Creative Writers (1988),
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989), and websites
(http://library.uno.edu/~lirf/bibs/english/southlit.html). Patricia Dominguez ended the
program with her experiences with Documenting
the American South, a digitization project at UNC, Chapel Hill
(http://metalab.unc.edu/docsouth/).

Linda Stein

University of Delaware
llstein@UDel.Edu

Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare – a reply to Professor Gail Kern
Paster

I am very grateful for the opportunity to respond on behalf of Chadwyck-Healey to
Professor Paster’s review of Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare (
Biblio-Notes Spring 1999). The review raises some important issues relating
to the purpose and use of electronic texts in general and to the editorial principles
and accuracy of Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare ( EAS) in
particular. I will address some of Professor Paster’s specific criticisms in a
moment, but first I want to point out two fundamental misconceptions that distort much
of what Professor Paster wrote about the database.

Professor Paster bases her remarks on the assumption that the texts in the database were
scanned. She implies that the purported errors that she has noticed are merely local
examples of a general problem afflicting all the texts in EAS, a problem
created by our use of scanning technology. Let me assure Professor Paster that no
scanner came near any part of the database. Given the current state of technology it
would be absurd to attempt to capture the Folio in this way. All the texts in
EAS were double-keyed from photocopies of the original documents, verified,
and proofed. Double keying means that the texts are keyed twice by different keyers and
the two versions are then compared by a computer. Where discrepancies arise, they are
manually checked and resolved with reference to the original text. The Folio text, which
is the focus of Professor Paster’s remarks, was subjected to this process and then
100% proofread. In many areas where the text was thought to be problematic it was then
200% proofread. The basis of Professor Paster’s criticism of the database is
therefore a false one.

We do not claim that our keying and checking processes are infallible. Indeed, Professor
Paster may well have identified genuine errors, but these need to be looked at
individually and their claims assessed. To imply that any class of alleged mistake in
the text will be repeated across the entire database because of an automated process of
character misrecognition is completely inaccurate. To suggest that any part of the
database consists of ‘machine-produced nonsense’ is incorrect.

In EAS we captured texts ‘as seen’. We did not silently correct
errors, or collate different copies of the originals to achieve a ‘best’ or
accepted reading. Like any electronic text, ours cannot hope to reproduce all the
typographical and physical features of the original book. It is not a
‘replica‘ and no one should be led to suppose that it is. Instead, we aim to
present a fully searchable version of the original text, preserving its peculiarities
(including original mistakes). Because of the typographical problems of the Folio, to
say nothing of copy-specific variants, suspected mistakes in the database need to be
checked one by one against our source copy (clearly identified in the bibliography as
the copy held in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge). Professor Paster’s
collation results in her charging us with at least one error which, under the editorial
principle just outlined, appears not to be an error at all: ‘loyner‘ for
‘Ioyner‘(Act 1, line 311) is a correct transcription of our source. This may
be a case of a typesetter using an ‘l‘ for an uppercase ‘i‘. In
this instance, it is hard to see that our text is any more confusing to the unwary
undergraduate than the original would be. A similar point could be made about the
spacing of ‘away’ (Act 1, line 8). We might debate whether the slightly
larger inter-letter spacing in the Folio should be reflected in the electronic text as
‘a way’. It is arguable that this space should be represented by something
less than an inter-word space, but as Paster herself invokes the significance of
material aspects of the early printed book, it is not obvious that the irregularity
should be ignored. As with ‘loyner’, the textual scholar cannot have it both
ways: either aspects of the original, unintended and mistaken though they may be, should
be retained, or they should be silently corrected in the interests of clarity and
accessibility to less scholarly users.

But perhaps the more fundamental misconception in the review concerns the question: what
is a database like EAS for? EAS is a keyed and fully searchable
electronic version of eleven major editions of Shakespeare, 28 contemporary printings of
individual plays and poems, apocrypha and related works. It also contains more than one
hundred adaptations, sequels and burlesques dating from the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. It is not and does not claim to be an electronic or photographic facsimile of
the originals. However, it does enable a student to look, for example, at all the uses
of a particular word, or phrase, across the entire Shakespearean corpus, or to compare,
line by line on one screen, the version of King Lear in the Folio and Quarto
and through ten subsequent editions. By allowing users to synchronize different
editions, it makes easy the comparison of editorial practice over 250 years. Whatever
the virtues of electronic facsimiles such as the admirable collection produced by the
University of Pennsylvania, they have none of the potential for linguistic and thematic
analysis of the plays that is offered by EAS. Professor Paster does not mention
the contents or functionality of the database at all, let alone assess their advantages
to students and scholars.

Professor Paster concludes: ‘I honestly fail to see why any teacher of Shakespeare
would reproduce pages of the Chadwyck-Healey First Folio . . . ’. This is to
misunderstand the purpose of EAS, which is not intended as a substitute for
paper-based teaching. Nor, clearly, is it an appropriate tool for introducing students
to the material aspects of early printed texts. However, were Professor Paster (like
many current users of EAS) interested in teaching variants, allusion,
quotation, verbal echo, changing editorial approaches to Shakespeare, the historical
re-purposing of Shakespeare’s plots and characters, and a whole host of other
literary investigations to which a fully searchable database gives access, then she
might agree that EAS represents a unique and valuable resource.

Dan Burnstone
Publisher, Literature
Chadwyck-Healey, Ltd.

dan.burnstone@chadwyck.co.uk

English Department Web Sites with Links to
Resources

The genesis of this article was Scott Stebelman's observation that librarians often
visit each others' Web sites, but may not have reviewed Web sites created by English
departments. These Web sites may contain links to resources not often included on
library sites. In response to this request for an article, I made a series of forays
into approximately 200 primarily American and Canadian English department web sites.
These are some of my discoveries.

Getting there is part of the fun. To identify English department Web sites, check the
following:

• 
  David Hoover's
  English Department Home Pages Worldwide
  
  
  (http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/english/links/engdpts.html)
  Probably
  one of the most comprehensive sites, with a listing of 1300 English departments
  worldwide.
• 
  William C. Dowling’s
  100 English Department Home Pages
  
  
  (http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~wcd/engweb1.htm)
  A smaller site
  focusing on major English Departments.
• Marist College’s English Departments Online
  
  (http://www.marist.edu/humanities/english/engdep.html)
  Includes an
  annotated listing of a selection of English departments with home pages. Also points
  you to useful sites that are related to, but not necessarily maintained by, English
  departments—some Humanities Department sites and sites produced by individuals
  are included.
• 
  University of
  Florida
  
  
  (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/CLAS/american-universities.html)
  Maintains
  an extensive listing of "American Universities." Catch is that these link to the
  university home page, from whence you need to locate the English department, usually
  under the heading "Academics."

Once you arrive at an English department home page, the next challenge is figuring out if
they have links to the Web and where they have located them. Some departments put links
on their home page, but for others you need to dig down three or four levels before the
sites emerge. In either case, no standard terminology exists. I found web links under
all of the following headings: Additional Web Resources, Electronic Tool Kit, English
World, Gateways & Link Collections, Interesting Links to Other English Web Sites,
Internet Research Resources, Links, A Literary Index, Literary Resources, Resources,
Resources & References, Resources for Readers and Writers, Resources for Research,
Scratch the ("Lynx"?) to view a collection of relevant Web sites, Selected Links to the
Web, Useful Sites of Interest, Web Sites, and Writerly Resources. "Links" and
"Resources" were the most commonly used terms.

Some of the sites simply listed links in no discernable order; others were classified
and, in some cases, annotated as well. Some English department sites include links to
online resources available by subscription, such as JSTOR or the OED.
Others link exclusively to information freely available on the Web. Some pages include
links over to the library and its resources, but others do not. Nearly every department
with links to the Web included one or more of these: