Young Lion makes a meal of CD

LITERATURE ONLINE Chadwyck-Healey, +44 1223 215512, Annual subscription to all available databases for 2-4 users Pounds 15,665+VAT. http://lion. chadwyck.co.uk

Literature Online (Lion) is a collection of electronic texts, bibliographies, and Internet resources in English and American literature on the World Wide Web. Institutions wishing to use the service will pay an annual subscription for Web access to such databases as English Poetry, English Drama, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, American Poetry, and African-American Poetry. Within the next six months Early English Prose Fiction, The Bible in English, and Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare will be added.

Placing these resources in a Web environment has several advantages for both universities and users. The ability to search these valuable databases not only on a PC but also on a Macintosh or Unix - because the Web is not platform-dependent - must be accounted a great breakthrough. Speed is one of the chief advantages of Lion; even the 1,500 pages of Richardson's Clarissa, the largest text in the database, took only 12 or 13 minutes to download. The often vexing problems of mounting CDs on a server and delivering them over a local area network (LAN) would be significantly reduced for subscribing institutions. Using the master index to search all of Lion's data sets simultaneously, without having to quit and reload as when searching networked CD-Roms, is a significant advantage. After executing several searches, users can browse back and forth over their findings in a way not possible when searching the same data on a local server. Clearly, Lion represents the way of the future and signals the beginning of a diminution of the local CD-Rom's importance as a research tool.

There is, however, a considerable price for Web delivery of the more than 200,000 texts available on Lion. Command-line searching, the ability to execute a customised examination of a text based on the embedded StandardGeneralised Markup Language (SGML) tags, is an important and powerful feature of these databases in their CD-Rom form. Lamentably, online users have lost this ability, because the delivery software Chadwyck-Healey chose for Lion (OpenText) is "relational" rather than "full SGML". This limits the kind of questions a scholar can ask. Had Lion employed a different package (DynaWeb) this problem would, I understand, have been obviated.

Lion's provision of reference resources from other publishing companies is, thus far, somewhat disappointing, but does include the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature, the Bibliography of American Literature, and Webster's Third New International Dictionary. Presumably publishers are biding their time to see how Chadwyck-Healey's electronic publishing experiment fares before committing themselves. If Lion were to include, say, the MLA Bibliography, the Oxford English Dictionary, the Dictionary of National Biography and/or the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and the forthcoming English Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1800), then its claim to be "the home of English and American literature on the World Wide Web" would carry far more weight. The Wing database, published by the MLA in association with Chadwyck-Healey, should be added without further delay. English Prose Drama and English Verse Drama have been sensibly combined, though at present Verse Drama, like its CD-Rom version, is missing approximately 50 per cent of the surviving texts in the periods it claims to cover. Prose Drama too is worryingly incomplete, missing between 10 and 20 per cent of what it ought to contain. Nor have the much discussed lacunae in the English Poetry database yet been filled. One advantage of online delivery is the ease and speed with which Chadwyck-Healey will be able to correct such faults and make further improvements.

Lion's links to other Internet resources are particularly thin, and users would do much better to use a free site such as BARD or Alan Liu's "Voice of the Shuttle" humanities research Web page. It is not enough for Lion simply to group woefully incomplete lists of discussion groups, pages, journals, and research resources of widely varying quality under such rubrics as "Medieval" or "19th Century", especially since there are so many unreliable texts and a fair bit of slipshod scholarship on the Internet.

If an academic institution is going to pay a commercial enterprise to help students find free electronic resources, then it may reasonably expect that corporation to invest the time and money to explore sites, check the reliability of electronic texts, and provide thoughtful and informative annotations.

Prices depend upon the number of databases subscribed to and the number of simultaneous users allowed. Most libraries could reasonably expect to pay between Pounds 10,000 and Pounds 20,000 per annum for reasonably thorough coverage of what is available.

Doubtless many institutions will encounter difficulty in finding recurrent funds and will look to the Combined Higher Education Software Team (CHEST) and the Arts and Humanities Data Service for help. The ancients believed that the lion whelp was born dead and remained so until its father breathed life into it. Chadwyck-Healey's Lion, a pioneering experiment in electronic publishing, is very much alive.

At this early stage it has many shortcomings, most of which can be remedied. Though still just a whelp, Lion is a powerful research tool of enormous promise. But how many universities can afford to keep such a beast?

Michael F. Suarez, SJ is a junior research fellow at St. John's College,Oxford.