Reviewed July 1998
Review by John MacColl
The Internet Public Library Online Literary Criticism Collection can be found at http://www.ipl.org/ref/litcrit/. The Internet Public Library (IPL), based at the University of Michigan School of Information, is run by four professional librarians and a team of volunteers. Its mission statement begins with the words "The Internet is a mess...", and it aims to find, evaluate, select, organise, describe and create quality information resources.
The IPL's Online Literary Criticism Collection is, however, no better than an enthusiastic start to a work of such proportions that effort on such a small scale would never be sufficient to complete it.
Commendably, the site works to a Collection Development Policy, and prefers criticism written by graduate students or professionally published reviews. The problem for literature scholars seeking to use a resource like this is that it is full of holes. As a useful reference source, its obvious lack of comprehensiveness is a very serious drawback. British writers are poorly served by it - there is nothing on Philip Larkin or Muriel Spark, for example, to name two random examples. Searching under J. D. Salinger yields an interesting essay on "The Catcher in the Rye", but a pitiful plot synopsis provided by the site itself.
In order to be of value to scholars, this site would require to be seriously developed in the direction of creation of resources (by gaining permission to republish existing criticism) rather than in its other aims. However, on such a small resource base, it is difficult to see it becoming any more than a last resort site for students desperate to find some published criticism in a hurry.
Reviewed by: John MacColl
Ariadne Project Director
University of Abertay Dundee
Email: j.maccoll@tay.ac.uk
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on 24-Jul-1998