Useful Links for Students of Literature


Not of course a definitive list: these are places I have found useful, or interesting: I hope it helps.

Here are the main headings:

 
For Beginners:

You might find it useful to bookmark this page. To do that (in Netscape), pull down the Bookmark menu and select 'Add Bookmark'. That's it. Next time you want to go to this page, just pull down the bookmark menu and select 'Useful links'.

Electronic journals

Here, courtesy of the University of Strathclyde (thank you, Strathclyde) is a list of links to many literary electronic full-text journals. To access them you will need to get a BIDS username and password, which you can do by applying to the Library enquiry desk.

Newspapers

Almost all the UK newspapers are online--here is a page of links.

Searching for book titles

There are many electronic library catalogues freely available on the Web. The most useful are:

COPAC is a new nationally accessible catalogue. Based at the University of Manchester, COPAC provides unified access to the consolidated online catalogues of some of the largest university research libraries in the UK and Ireland. COPAC is normally available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and access is free of charge.

The COPAC database currently contains approximately 3.5 million records. These represent the merged online library catalogues of the universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin. The records from a further twelve university library catalogues (including Birmingham's) will be added in due course, and there are plans for the addition of material from further libraries in the future.


For anything published in the UK before 1978 (when the catalogues began to be electrified) it's something of a lottery. Try:

Books in print


A complete list of books in print in the UK is to be searched at the gigantic site of Amazon, who now dominate the Web book market . The US arm of Amazon, which has all American books in print, is here. If you want to stick to the UK product, Waterstones and Blackwells are also in the Web, with large databases. All these sites will enable you to find out what's in print on any subject or by any author; you can also buy the books from them, often at a discount, but watch out for the postage charge...

Film

If you want to include film in your research, The Internet Movie Database seems to be the obvious place to start. Here is what they say about themselves:

Welcome to The Internet Movie Database (IMDb). This area contains an introduction to the site describing some of the basic features. The IMDb is the ultimate movie reference source and covers everything you could ever possibly want to know about movies. It's fully hyperlinked both within the database and to thousands of external sites and is updated continuously.


About the Web

My theory is you don't need to know anything about the Web: just use it. It's very very simple. If you start asking questions, you tend to find yourself drowning in acronyms very soon. But if you want to know more, you might look at Aberdeen University's sensible WWW Information Pack.

Searching for articles

The best way used to be to use the CDRom of the MLA Bibliography in the Library. No longer: BIDS is now on the Web, in a wonderfully friendly form. Here you can search a vast store of periodicals for the full details of articles, by subject or author, in three categories (Science, Social Sciences, and Arts), from 1981 to very recently. The Science and Social Science categories usually have summaries. You can mark the articles you're interested in, and the list will be automatically emailed to you. This is a wonderful resource. To use it you need a login and password, which, if you're a member of Birmingham University, you can get from the Library Information desk very easily.

You might also try UnCover. This is a commercial service, and they make money by (at your request) faxing you copies of any article you want from a vast number of periodicals. At a price: 18 dollars plus per article. However, it does mean that they have a huge database of titles to search.

More useful and much cheaper is their Reveal service. You nominate up to 50 periodicals from their list, and they email you the contents of each new issue as it comes out, for a mere 15 dollars a year. Indispensable...


Searching the Web

Every word on the whole of the Web is indexed, amazingly enough. You can search it easily. It used to be that Alta Vista was the best search engine; Hotbot is now finding much favour amongst the cognoscenti. You can find all occurrences of any word or set of words anywhere in the world, and go to each of them with a simple click. Here are some other search tools: infoseek, lycos, and GOD. I have not tried GOD.


Literary sites on the Web

The Voice of the Shuttle has an excellent set of links to all literary sites. Visit it and be amazed. Try also the Oxford English Faculty Library site, which is beautifully maintained (by a former Birmingham Bibliographer) and has many useful literary links. The Labyrinth has a wonderful set of Medieval links.


Bibliography on the Web

Studies in Bibliography makes its majestic presence felt. The entire set of volumes is online: a brilliantly generous and far-seeing move. There is an extraordinarily rich list of book-related sites created by two Dutch booksellers, Ton Cremers and Marian Beereboom.


Other English Departments

Well, you never know: you might want to see what the others are doing. The best that I know of is Dundee. This has a very useful set of links, and is beautifully designed. Try their extraordinary concordances. Here is a list of all of the rest: all the English sites in the world. How long have you got? And here is Litweb, which wishes to act as a sort of noticeboard for Academic Eng Lit, though it's a little thin at the moment.


Electric texts

If you're looking for books on the Web (there are a lot), try


Mailing lists

You subscribe (at no cost) to a Mailing list on any topic you find interesting, and any email you or anyone else sends to the list is automatically posted to everyone on the list. Effectively, it's like joining an electronic seminar the size of the planet. Here is a list of lists:


Mac stuff

Mac games (for Julie)


Just Browsing

On the other hand, if all you want to do is to look around and see what's out there, you could try here first: Awesome Lists.

If you can think of anything else that ought to be here, please email me.

Tom Davis



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