The ALEX Catalog of Electronic Texts is a collection of digital texts from American literature, British literature and Western philosophy. The primary purpose of the catalog is to provide a base of texts that demonstrate Eric Lease Morgan’s philosophy of “arscience” ‐ a process of understanding that uses methods from both the arts and the sciences. It is the catalog’s secondary purpose that would probably draw the interest of most of ERR’s readers: “to provide value‐added access to some of the world’s great literature, in turn providing the means for education”.
ALEX is best suited to work with a Netscape browser. Adobe Acrobat (freely distributed) is helpful for looking at the texts, saving them, and using them effectively. Users may also want to download a copy of RealPlayer to hear Mr Morgan, the site’s manager, describe the unique features of his catalog (an enhancement that merely supplements a copy of the text he reads).
ALEX’s query capability covers the basic fields of author and title. There are other indexed fields; but, at the time of this review, none of the records included terms for genre and few for keywords. A successful search will bring up a record containing the full text of literary works. No criticism discussing the literary texts is provided.
Students could use ALEX to find copies of texts by certain authors whose literature supports the theory that Morgan explores with the collection; a theory he has named “arscience.” But arscience is esoteric and whether or not a student finds this theory useful has little to do with the value of the database. The only time that the theory really comes into play in using ALEX is as a way of understanding the collection of certain items in the catalog while others remain marginalized. The theory seems to drive Morgan’s collection policy. This policy states that all texts included must be in the public domain and must be “great” literature, that which is worthy of the Norton anthologies (as an example). Consequently, a student using ALEX to research Shakespeare’s text will have a much easier time than one looking for George Eliot, Aphra Behn, or Jane Austen.
It is for the breadth of its content that ALEX may draw the most criticism. But for what it does have, this tool can be helpful to young scholars who are looking for a quick way to compare ideas across texts or who are looking for electronic copies of a text. It seems best suited to the determined searcher, as indexing can be inconsistent. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, seems to have one submission in the database, while Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has two listed but actually three when the user clicks on the author link to look at the entries. While inconsistent indexing didn’t prevent me from getting to items, it might not be as successful for a student who may be a less persistent or critical searcher.
Overall, ALEX seems best suited for undergraduates whose needs do not include a reliable scholarly edition of a text or an explanation of the texts used. It is merely a tool for those wanting to search popular texts for a theme or to obtain a copy of a text for casual reading and explication. ALEX would benefit from an overhaul in vocabulary as the jargon used to describe search capabilities may intimidate and complicate searches for basic undergraduate users. The “full‐featured interface” could easily befuddle students who do not intuit the differences between “exact, stemming, and sub‐string” search types and are more comfortable with more colloquial terms such as “phrase” or “keyword.”
ALEX is not recommended for higher level research requiring reliable editions for searching textual variants, except for its possible value as a tool to trace a theme, the existence of a word or idea across texts, or for its use as a concordance. In this way, ALEX most enhances our use of electronic texts.
