I vividly recall when our institution set up its first gopher menu system. This heralded a new beginning to research and a wealth of new resources to utilize; The English Server was one such resource. I remember for being excited over the unique treasures that were uncovered through the various menus of the Server. Now, almost ten years later,I’m reviewing the latest Web version of this product ‐ a much better and easier service that still offers those unique treasures that was the Server’s original strong feature.
Established in 1990 at the Carnegie Mellon University by a group of graduate students who were interested in sharing ideas and resources, The English Server has developed into a full service site offering Web, ftp,e‐mail, gopher, mailing list, and listserv services to users worldwide. The original hardware was donated by the English Department at Carnegie Mellon (hence the name) to “found a server run by graduate students for the public distribution of research, criticism, novels, hypertext, and miscellaneous writing from humanities disciplines” (About the Server, History URL: http://eserver.org/about/history.html).
Originally only CMU English Department students, faculty and staff were allowed to contribute to the site. Now, if you are not affiliated with the department, you are allowed to apply for membership with the sponsorship of an existing English Server member and a potential project to be developed. Today, this 225 strong member‐run cooperative refuses to fall prey to the profitability of the Internet. Instead, it continues to uphold the sharing and contribution of ideas, relying almost entirely on volunteers, grants, and donations and using the technology as an open communication device. With over 550,000 visitors per week, this choice is obviously very popular with others also!
With its main focus on the arts and humanities, The English Server offers over 26,000 publications ‐ essays, fiction, journals, theory, drama and poetry ‐ in art,architecture, drama, fiction, poetry, history, political theory, cultural studies, philosophy, women’s studies, and music. It also publishes world‐recognized journals such as Bad Subjects (http://eserver.org/bs/) (politics and culture), Cultronix (http://eserver.org/ cultronix/) (contemporary art and cultural theory), and Sudden (http://eserver.org/ sudden/) (original poetry).
The server provides links to various services such as libraries, home pages, and e‐journals. New features include a site for the discussion of Web page design. For those not so academically inclined, or in need of a rest from academe, The English Server offers links to vegetarian recipes and other related recipe sites! The actual content of this site is its main strength but also its main weakness. It’s like the entire Internet searching situation ‐ too much information; too little time. This overwhelming aspect of the site has, in the past, elicited criticism about content errors and organizational problems (Lunsford, various pages). However, the site searched today seemed relatively easy to navigate even with the amount of information provided.
On the home page, there are two options to navigate through the site ‐ by the subject headings provided or the search facility. Working through the “Our collections”headings, visitors can browse quite successfully through the various headings if they know under what area their topic is covered and if they are familiar with the subject content of the various e‐journals. The listings do provide a very brief description which helps to make appropriate selections. This is probably the simplest way of browsing through the copies of a favourite e‐journal, plays, or other resource.
Once into the various subject area pages, the quality of some of the sites deteriorates a bit. For example, the colours used on the Drama page make a lot of the text extremely difficult to read; and, when entries are selected, the default visited link colour is black (the same colour as the background!). Other pages, however, like the “Cultural studies” and “Critical theory” pages are elegant and simple to manoeuver through.
From the home page, a search facility is provided which searches key words from selected sites both in the Server and on the Internet as a whole (i.e. Altavista, Bartlett’s Quotations, Project Gutenburg, and the E‐Server). This is a very simple facility to use but needs to be more focussed on The English Server site primarily and not the outside resources. These outside sources could easily be added to another page. Instead of searching Altavista and the others, this facility should search the various sub‐sections of the server such as the e‐journals, listservs, etc.
A secondary search facility, named Search Us, is provided and allows for much more complicated searching. Limits can be placed on where to search for key words (URLs, titles, headers) and when they were placed in the system (from past day to last update). Three other options exist which are not quite self explanatory: detailed results, search phonetically, and begins with searching. With the glaring lack of any help pages, these facilities are simply left to one’s imagination. Boolean logic appears to work; but, once again, with no instruction provided, searching turns into a trial and error process.
The results, once retrieved, are ranked by relevance and give a link to the actual item as well as the first line of the page, similar to most search engine retrievals. The Server also provides the date the site was last updated, the size of the file, links to similar pages, and notes whether or not the site is new to the Server. The link to the final product, while not pretty, is sufficient, as the text comes through fine and is easily downloaded as a text file.
Overall I give this entire site a very good recommendation, especially considering the uniqueness of content and presentation. I would like, however, to see a little more continuity from the various sites inside the Server to indicate that they belong together. This, along with an improved search engine, would make this site much more approachable.
