Project Gutenburg comes to Canada

Canada Day marked an important online event for librarians, bibliophiles, and humanities-computing types as Project Gutenburg Canada launched its site.

Project Gutenburg publishes the text of books in the public domain (in Canada, 50 years after the author’s death). The books are free to read and download, and many are items that are out of print and often difficult to find.

Visit Project Gutenburg Canada http://www.gutenberg.ca/
Visit Project Gutenburg http://www.gutenberg.org/

Epistolary Literature

The latest from the BBC’s In Our Time podcast is a session on epistolary literature:

From its first appearance in the 17^th Century with writers like Aphra Behn, epistolary fiction, fiction in the form of letters, reached its heyday in the 18^th Century . . . So why was letter writing so important to 18^th Century authors? How did this style aid the development of the novel? And why did epistolary literature fall out of favour? . . . From the  In Our Time website

Contributers to this session include:

John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London
Karen O’Brien, Professor in English at the University of Warwick
Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham

Listen by visiting the In Our Time website and downloading the podcast here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/

Favourite Medieval / Renaissance Sites

The Literatures in English Section of the Association of College and University Libraries recently had a great discussion of Medieval and Renaissance websites on its listserv. Some of the most promising sources (in no particular order):

• One of my personal favourites is the British Library’s Treasures in Full, entire digitized manuscripts, includin ghte Caxton Chaucer, Malory’s Arthurian Manuscript, and the Gutenburg Bible.
• The Word on the Street: A collection of broadsides from the National Library of Scotland.
• Originally published in the April 2005 edition of College and Research Libraries News, John Jaeger and Paul Victor Jr.’s “Medieval Studies: Gateways, Subject Guides, and More” provides a detailed list of internet resources.
  
• The Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads includes scanned and digitized copies of over 30, 000 broadside ballads.
• Exploring Luminarium is always fruitful.
• Cambridge English Renaissance Electronic Service.
  
• The University of Toronto’s Lexicons of Early Modern English “searches and displays word-entries from monolingual English dictionaries, bilingual lexicons, technical vocabularies, and other encyclopedic-lexical works, 1480-1702.”
  
• McMaster University has produced an impressive Beowulf in Hypertext site.
  
• The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies has an excellent selection of resources for electronic research.
• The Voice of the Shuttle’s Anglo-Saxon & Medieval Links and Renaissance & 17th Century Links are incredibly rich resources.
  
• Other suggestions included databases such as Project Muse or JStor, along with the rather unusual choice of PubMed (a major medical database), searching for “Literature, Medieval” and/or “History, Medieval” in the MeSH Major Topic field.

English Short Title Catalogue FREE from the British Library

In addition to providing some fabulous online exhibitions and learning resources, the British Library is now providing FREE online access to the English Short Title Catalogue. A resource that should be familiar to many researchers, the ESTC was previously only available though subscription.

Some information about the ESTC from the British Library:

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) covers monograph and serial letterpress items:

• Printed before 1801.
• Printed in the British Isles, Colonial America, United States of America (1776-1800), Canada, or territories governed by Britain, in all languages.
• Printed in any other part of the world, wholly or partly in English or other British vernaculars.
• With false imprints claiming publication in London, in any language

BBC In Our Time

BBC Radio 4 produces an excellent program called In Our Time which is now available as a series of podcasts free online. Not only can you listen to the broadcast, you can also follow up on the topic with theSubject Research area (a librarian’s dream!).

The latest show investigates the life and legacy of Alexander Von Humboldt:

“Darwin described him as ‘the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived’. Goethe declared that one learned more from an hour in his company than eight days of studying books and even Napoleon was reputed to be envious of his celebrity ” (BBC Radio 4)

If Von Humboldt doesn’t fascinate you, you can also visit the In Our Time Archive page, which can direct to you recordings of past broadcasts on Pastoral Literature, Chaucer, Goethe, Marlowe, Ruskin, the Scottish Enlightenment, Rhetoric, and much more.

Enjoy.

What’s on the Web? Herb Block, Slave Narratives, and More

From the Scout Report:

• Enduring Outrage: Editorial Cartoons by Herblock http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/herblock-home.html
  “This exhibition features original work by the Pulitzer Prize winning political cartoonist Herb Block and draws from the generous gift of 14,000 original drawings and more than 50,000 preparatory sketches donated to the Library of Congress by the Herb Block Foundation in 2002.”

• Slave Narratives http://moadsf.org/salon/exhibits/slave_narratives/index.html
  

  With a powerful narration by Dr. Maya Angelou, the opening frames of the Slave Narrative website pique even the most casual visitors’ interest immediately. Created by the Museum of the African Diaspora.

• Selections from the Naxi Manuscript Collection http://international.loc.gov/intldl/naxihtml/naxihome.html
  “Selections from the Naxi Manuscript Collection features ceremonial writings of the Naxi people of Yunnan Province, China. The Library of Congress’s Naxi collection is the largest outside of China and is considered one of the finest in the world. The Naxi use a unique pictographic writing system that is similar to the ancient Egyptian and Mayan writing systems. It is the only living pictographic language in the world today. This online presentation features 185 manuscripts, a 39½ -foot funerary scroll, and an annotated catalog of the entire collection.”

What’s on the Web?

Internet resources in student papers may make you cringe, but the web is full of interesting and edifying diversions! Some featured resources from the July / August issue of Choice: 

• Intute http://www.intute.ac.uk/ 
  The new face of the now-combined Humbul Humanities Hub and Artifact sites, Intute provides well-catalogued links to a range of web resources in the hunmanitied and sciences.
• TEAMS Middle English Texts http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm 
  Online Middle English texts from the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages.
• Centre for Applied Linguistics http://www.cal.org/
  The Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) is a private, nonprofit organization working to improve communication through better understanding of language and culture.
• Science Fiction and Fantasy Database http://library.tamu.edu/cushing/sffrd
  Hal W. Hall’s collection of more than 73 000 historical and critical citations about the related genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
• Reading Women Writers and African Literature http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/AFLIT/FEMEChomeEN.html
  This site provides an overview of francophone African women writers, south of the Sahara. 
• Geoffrey Chaucer http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/ 
  Harvard’s Chaucer site provides introductory and critical articles, translations, glossed versions of relevant sources, visual and auditory aids, and many other resources.