LION

Literature Online

On December 3rd 1996 Chadwyck-Healey launched Lion - Literature Online, a web site which provides access to more than 210,000 works of English and American literature, drawn from their full-text databases. In addition, a Master Index includes links to literary texts on the Internet.

Until now Chadwyck-Healey's databases have only been available on CD-ROM, for one-time purchase. They will now be accessible, on annual subscription, from any Internetworked machine within a subscribing institution. The cost of the subscription varies according to the number of databases chosen and the number of concurrent accesses required. There are reductions for institutions who have already licensed full-text databases on CD-ROM or magnetic tape.

In an interview conducted for Information World Review (October 1996), Steven Hall, Managing Director at Chadwyck-Healey, stated, 'Initially we envisaged a more conventional client-server approach rather than the Web, but then it occurred to us that we could add considerable value to these databases in an online context not only by making them cross-searchable but also by combining them with other elements to create a huge literary site. Those other elements [might] consist of secondary resources, such as dictionaries and bibliographical and biographical databases. . . The idea is that if you're looking at a poem, say, in one of the full-text databases and you want to look up a word, you'll be able to go into a dictionary, look up that word and then come back out of it. Or you could search a bibliographic database for journal articles on the author or work in question, or look up the author in a biographical database‹all from within the service. It will make a far more rounded resource for anyone studying or researching English and American literature than anything available at the moment.'

Literature Online can be found at http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk. Free trial access is available to any institution considering a subscription. At CTI Textual Studies we would be interested to hear from institutions considering a subscription to this online resource and suggest that you contact us before purchasing a licence.

A full review of Literature Online will be published in the next issue of Computers & Texts.

[Table of Contents] [Letter to the Editor]

Computers & Texts 13 (1996), 25. Not to be republished in any form without the permission of CTI Textual Studies.

HTML Author: Michael Fraser (mike.fraser@oucs.ox.ac.uk)
Document Created: 7 January 1997
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