E-Views and Reviews: The 19th Century Revisited

READER MAIL concerning database names and product branding has been copious and fervent. The following nicely conveys the overall flavor of the responses: “It bugs me that database names often aren't displayed! Librarians are used to looking for names, but patrons are not. A faculty member (who regularly uses online databases) spent the entire weekend thinking that she was unable to access a database because its name was not displayed on its search page. Is there a way to convince publishers to display database names prominently?” Well, publishers, is there?

QUOTE OF THE WEEK “Our new LexisNexis® Academic service is in beta phase and is being rolled out to customers, offering more powerful searching across broader content categories. The improved user interface is built on the same global platform as our corporate Nexis® product, which brings the look, feel, and functionality of professional LexisNexis® products to general academic users for the first time. The new LexisNexis® Academic has article-level linking to support OpenURL, supports federated searching via an XML gateway, and will allow citation exports to RefWorks. In surveys of 101 academic customers participating in previews of the new service, 93 percent feel that the new redesign will meet most or all their needs for using LexisNexis®. The full launch is set for July 2007.”—Alistair Morrison, Product Manager, LexisNexis® Academic

Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Collection
Rotunda/Univ. of Virginia Pr.
rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/index.php

Rotunda's Nineteeth-Century Literature and Culture Collection provides “scholars and students at all levels an invaluable source of primary and secondary materials by some of the era's most enduring figures,” including William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (the first African American novel, published in London in 1853 when the author was a slave in the United States—this includes all four versions, published between 1853 and 1867); The Journal of Emily Shore: Revised and Expanded; The Letters of Christina Rossetti; The Letters of Matthew Arnold; and Herman Melville's Typee. The full texts are indexed and fully searchable, as well as accompanied by biographical materials, commentaries, essays, chronologies, and other material.

HOW DOES IT WORK? Since the individual titles may be purchased separately, Rotunda has set up its system so you can search across all titles in the collection at once or enter each title individually to browse. To search across the titles you simply type your term(s) into a single search box. To search within each title, at the “Rotunda Entrance” (opening screen), one selects the title, then searches or browses within the book by various means, including alphabetically indexed terms and names, content outlines and notes, and more.

CAN YOU AND YOUR PATRONS USE IT? Before I did anything else, I went to the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online to find out more on Emily Shore but couldn't find her there. I switched to Wikipedia and got this: “Margaret Emily Shore (1819–39) kept a journal from the age of 11 until her death of consumption at the age of 19. Extracts of her journal were published by her sisters Louisa and Arabella in 1891. A second edition was printed in 1898,” along with references to Shore's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (written by Barbara Timm Gates) and to the print version of the journal, edited by Gates. Once I entered the title online, I retrieved more background context from Rotunda that aligned with the Wikipedia information.

I then tried a search for “consumption” across the titles in the collection, since Shore suffered and died from the disease, and it seemed a likely topic to be discussed in 19th-century writings. I got a total of 22 hits across the collection. Turns out it's necessary to repeat the search within each title to view results, which is somewhat annoying, especially since I had to back out of the title I was in to get back to my search results screen to view the other hits.

HOW GOOD IS IT? Rotunda has made the titles cross-searchable while retaining their uniqueness. The salient features and integrity of each work have been kept, while search methods have been tailored appropriately within each, with contextual help and explanatory notes. It rates an overall 9: while the content is excellent, the navigability should be more direct and the screen instructions clearer at times.

WHAT'S THE COST? Purchase prices for individual titles range from $75 to $845, with an annual maintenance fee of $50 per title. Prices for the complete set range from $1,168 to $2,312 (this includes the 20 percent discount customers receive for acquiring the complete collection). More pricing information is available on the web site.

THE BOTTOM LINE Nineteeth-Century Literature and Culture Collection is a highly accessible, scholarly product that will allow researchers in 19th-century literature, culture, and history to examine detailed, variant editions of important works. Recommended for academic and research libraries.