About literaryhistory.com

"What makes a source most desirable to student researchers? Access, access, access."¹

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Because internet users deserve better information

Literaryhistory.com catalogs credible literary criticism on nineteenth and twentieth century English and American literature that is available on the free internet. Because readers can click on a link that leads directly to an article, it offers an integration of the resource catalogue and the resources themselves. The critical articles are selected by the editor, based on the criteria of our selection policy. This site is intended to be a demonstration project, to show what would be possible if there were many good, open access articles on the internet, and if they were accessible through some filtered source, analyzed and screened by a literary scholar. It should be noted, however, that the resources we can link to are inevitably limited to the articles and books that are freely available online.

Whatever the limitations of the internet, the fact is that many students use it to find information about literature. And an even larger audience of readers doesn't have the opportunity to use an academic research library, or the expensive, library-issued passwords to use proprietary online materials. For various reasons, many people who would not undertake research in a traditional library find it appealing and easy to use the internet to get information. While students might be missing out on the genuine experience by not going to the library, their teachers should see this widespread use of the internet as a blessing as well as a curse. There are a lot more people looking things up than ever did before, and that gives us a chance to reach a new, larger audience for literature.

But there needs to be better information on the internet, and there also has to be a better way of finding the credible information that does exist. Web search engines, no matter how refined their algorithms, do not have the ability to make the careful distinctions that scholars and librarians are trained to make. At literaryhistory.com the editor screens internet articles, cataloging some and rejecting others based on our selection criteria. It's an approach similar to the traditional "recommended reading list" in college classes. In an ideal world, specialists on authors would select the links in internet bibliographies, in the same way they have traditionally recommended critical articles and books. If internet bibliographies were supervised by subject specialists, the most glaring problem of doing research on the internet - the lack of quality control - might be solved. Peer review is, of course, the gold standard for quality control.

We challenge all this web site's users, but especially teachers, professors, and librarians, to compare our links on any author to the results of a Google search on the same author. You will get from Google mostly anonymous web sites, containing unsigned articles, not fact checked or reviewed by peers or even an editor. It's not unusual to see paper mill and plagiarism sites near the top of a Google list. There are better articles on the internet than you would know from a quick Google search. And there is more reliable and in-depth information than unsigned Wiki entries. Literaryhistory.com catalogs signed articles, authored by specialists in literature, often originally published in peer-reviewed journals, academic press publications, published at web sites created by English faculty and scholarly societies, the Library of Congress, the British Library, and similar high-quality literary criticism and analysis, and some journalism from sources like the New York Times and Public Broadcasting. It is worth cataloging this material. After nine years of maintaining literaryhistory.com I've learned that, contrary to fears about the lack of persistence of web links, the better material tends to remain online. Even if an article does eventually disappear from the internet, if it was a worthy article in the first place what harm is there in having a record of it? Once we put article details in the literaryhistory.com bibliography they stay in, and we just remark "removed" if the link goes dead.

As scholarly writers and critics increasingly post articles online, the quality of any internet bibliography will continue to improve. The depth of the literaryhistory.com database is due mostly to the generous contributions of scholars to the open access internet. Many scholars have uploaded their own previously published articles to their own web sites, or given permission to group sites.² Some journals have been open-handed about publishing online, and the quality media has been especially active in this. There is also a wealth of material from peer reviewed journals made available by the heavily commercial but free source, Findarticles.com. With this much good material, it's possible to at least get started with real research on the public access internet these days. I think these bibliographies prove that, and demonstrate the potential for internet bibliographies.

Literaryhistory.com and Copyright

All of the articles indexed at this web site have been posted online by other parties. We make every effort to avoid linking to material that may be posted online in violation of copyright. We do not link to web sites that do not make clear who edits and publishes the site, and who is responsible for the site. We do not publish or republish articles, but are entirely dependent on the material that has been made freely available by others.

In 1998, before the first edition of literaryhistory.com appeared online, I consulted a copyright lawyer. The attorney advised me that linking is permitted under the fair use provision of copyright, as long as the web site was not making a profit from other people's work. Even so, in the early years of literaryhistory.com I always let other webmasters know when I had linked to their sites and informed them that I would be happy to remove the link if they objected. For the most part, though, my emails to webmasters were ignored, or if answered, they wearily replied in words to the effect of "of course you can link to our site, you don't need to ask."

Literaryhistory has also begun linking to some literary criticism and public domain books available at Google Books and the Internet Archive. But like so many others, I am concerned about the actions and intentions of Google Books. It has demonstrated a disdain for intellectual property rights and for editorial accuracy in its digitization project, and since Google material could disappear without notice, and all the links to the books there go dead, I am reluctant to invest much time linking to their books. But the ease of use of the Google Books interface is magnificent, far better than at the Internet Archive, and the access it gives to obscure, out-of-print books is a tremendous boon. In an ideal world the out-of-copyright books Google was allowed to digitize by the participating libraries will remain freely available for all internet users in the excellent Google interface. Perhaps someday the books will even be properly catalogued and an editor will correct some of the howlers in Google's citations.

Notes

¹ See Vicki Tolar-Burton and Scott A. Chadwick, "Investigating the Practices of Student Researchers: Patterns of Use and Criteria for Use of Internet and Library Sources," Computers and Composition 17, 3 (2000): 309–28.

² For more information on how to retain your electronic rights when negotiating with publishers, consult the Author Rights Initiative.

The editor and publisher of literaryhistory.com, Jan Pridmore, is a Ph.D. candidate at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Please email any comments to jan0428 at fastmail.fm

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