The Literary Encyclopedia described for Librarians

The Literary Encyclopedia

• is a scholar-owned internationally edited reference work which is constantly developing
• currently provides over 4700 profiles of authors, works and topics (literary, philosophical, historical) with a usual length of circa 2-2500 words (approaching 9 million words in total). Please click here to see a statistical breakdown.
• all of its articles have been written in the last eight years by its cadre of 1800 experts, 99% of whom have doctorates and published research in the area they write about
• is expected to comprise the work of 2200 scholars by the end of 2008 and 2500 by mid-2009
• publishes around 60 new articles each month (>100.000 words) and has over 1000 articles commissioned for the next 12-18 months
• provides a notably clean and fast interface which takes the reader to just what they want - reliable high-quality information
• offers a further 27,000 entries in the form of listed authors, fully indexed bibliographical lists of all significant works by major authors, enabling the construction of lists of works published by year, genre, country
• is edited by a distinguished international board and can be cited with confidence in scholarly work
• was positively reviewed by the American Library Association magazine Choice in April 2004
• is recommended by JISC in the United Kingdom
• covers cultural and political topics and events likely to be of interest to the literature student (5358 listed at present and a major focus of development in 2008)
• covers English, French, German, Russian literatures; has developing coverage of Latin nd Greek, and is starting to cover Hispanic, and is committed to covering all world literature as soon as it can
• has the most modest administrative and marketing superstructure and is therefore able to devote 90% of its revenues to producing new scholarly content and new software applications
• is committed to the highest scholarly values and to putting these before any commercial considerations
• is offered without charge to higher-educational institutions in countries listed by the United Nations as underdeveloped

Trial Access

Librarians are invited to apply for trial access by emailing the subscription manager.

Technical

Having been planned from its inception to make the best use of relational databases, The Literary Encyclopedia offers a scholarly and learning environment to rival anything in its class. All data is tagged with consistent metadata so cross-table searching and integration is easy to facilitate. Users can

• list an author's works from within an author record
• generate lists of authors according to genre, date span and country
• generate lists of works by genre, date span and country
• generate lists of literary and historical topics by date and country
• list contemporary authors and texts from within any article by clicking on one button
• compose sophisticated timelines relating literary texts to historical events
• list approved internet resources related to the record being read
• generate searches for recommended web resources by period, country and genre
• save particular searches timelines and articles to their own virtual "bookshelves"
• compile a particular set of records into a "bookshelf" and send a hyperlink to this bookshelf, for example to students on a particular course
• print articles in an attractive format

The Literary Encyclopedia is constantly refining existing data and functions, and innovating applications: our current developmental focus is on the following:

• improved coverage of historical events
• an anthology of key poems, prefaces and prose extracts (vide Defoe for example)
• has recently released a procedure for displaying "author timelines" - a month-by-month display of author's lives in relationship to the lives of other authors and/or historical context. 40 more author timelines are currently commissioned and we aim for around 200 by the end of 2009
• will release by March 1st 2008 a process for adding updating annotated recommendations for scholarly reading to all its articles, and in a form which will eventually enable linkage to local library resources via SFX

Access

We provide access

• via IP-address
• via individual accounts: any individual with a verified institutional email address (i.e. if email address = "????@youruniversity.edu" or "????@????.youruniversity.edu"). This login works additionally to IP-address access, or independently of it, so users can login from anywhere in the world without going through a university server. Individual users have their own account pages in the publication and can save articles and searches to their own personal "bookshelves".
• via Shibboleth and Athens - in theory - we are working with JISC to sort out some problems with Shibboleth (March 2008)

Right to Reproduce

Included in the rights of institutional subscribers is the right to print copies of all materials in The Literary Encyclopedia for use in pedagogic contexts within the institution.

For further information, please contact the Founding Editor:

Dr Robert Clark, FRSA, FEA.
Reader in English and American Literature, UEA Norwich
RobertClark@LitEncyc.com

[Updated 22 February 2008]

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