The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry <http://www.columbiagrangers.org> is an electronic, Web‐based version of several familiar Granger’s print products. The Web version also contains biographies of poets, some of which were adapted from Granger’s The Classic Hundred Poems. Others were based on entries in The Columbia Encyclopedia, while the remaining biographies were written specifically for this product. The product also includes a glossary of poetic terms created by the editor,William Harmon.
The opening screen offers users a menu of choices: a Simple Search, an Advanced Search, a search for the Anthologies that are indexed in the product, a search for Biographies, and a Glossary. The Simple Search allows users to select either a keyword search or an alphabetic search.
Although it is not stated anywhere, the choice of keyword or alphabetic search is important because it determines the available indexes. For an alphabetic search, users may select one of the following indexes to search from a drop‐down list: Author, Author Category, Subject, and either Title, First Line or Last Line. Users also have the option of limiting the results to those containing either excerpts of the poem or the complete poem. Selecting a keyword search adds a Words in Poem index and eliminates Author Category. The Advanced Search allows for Boolean searching with a drop‐down list of And, Or, or Not, and offers more index choices, including (words) Anywhere.
The opening interface is easy to navigate. Users may simply select the desired option to reach the search screen. Search results are organized into three different categories: E (excerpt), CP (complete poems) and T (Total poems indexed).
An author search on Matthew Arnold, for example, yields the hyperlinked entry Arnold, Matthew (1822‐88), followed by the number of titles returned in each of the three categories. Clicking on the hyperlink opens a screen listing the total number of titles retrieved followed by a separate box for each title with a heading for Title, Author and First Line. The Title and Author entries are both hyperlinked. Along the left hand side of each box are hyperlinked icons, representing whatever resources are available for that poem.
In the above search for Arnold, Matthew, one of the results, the poem entitled “At Some Lone Alehouse”, contains a complete set of resources. Although the icons are not labeled, the top icon links to either the complete poem or the excerpt, whichever is available. The next icon links to a Commentary about the poem.
The Granger’s staff selects which poems are to have commentaries, and these are written by the editor. The commentaries contextualize the poem and offer insights into the author’s techniques and provide explanations regarding the form of the poem and potentially difficult terms. Hyperlinks are provided to other poems by the same poet as well as to other comparable poems. The commentaries also contain brief bibliographies.
The third icon links to the poet’s Biography, which can also be linked to by clicking on the author’s name. Again, hyperlinks are provided to relevant poems, as are brief bibliographies. The final hyperlinked icon is to Poem Information. Here is provided a listing of the Title, Author, First Line and Last Line of the poem, as well as the subjects that the staff has used to index the poems. In addition, the Anthologies in which the poem appears are listed.
The Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry is a valuable resource that greatly improves upon the functionality of the printed products by combining the contents of several of them into a single, searchable database. The editor, William Harmon, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, is both a published poet and a scholar in the field. The commentaries on the poems and biographies of the poets are both concise and authoritative. They provide useful information for students attempting to understand and learn something about the context and formal properties of the poem.
This being said, however, there are certain shortcomings that complicate the navigation and search process. First, it would be useful if the product provided such navigational buttons as Back to Results, to save the user from having to click the Back button, perhaps more than once, in order to return to the results list. Similarly, it would be very useful if clicking on Help opened a separate window, to save the user from losing track of the search and having to click the Back button what may amount to several times.
Another difficulty is that no explanation is given for Author Category. I tried several candidates that I could think of for Author Category, including American women, Romantic, Victorian, etc., but each search retrieved no records.
A similar problem arises with Subject searches. There is no way for users to know what subject terms the staff uses to index the poems. No online thesaurus is provided, nor are there any cross‐references or see‐references. I tried a simple alphabetical subject search on Motherhood and retrieved no records. When I tried a keyword subject search, I retrieved five titles. The same search in Advanced Search using the Anywhere index retrieved 23 titles. When I checked the subject index in the printed version of the Columbia Granger’s Index to Poetry (which does, by the way, provide some see‐references), I found that the subject term used is Mothers.
A useful feature (particularly in the absence of an online thesaurus) would be to make the list of subject terms given for each retrieved poem under Poem Information into hyperlinks. This would more fully exploit the potential of the World Wide Web.
In fact, I suspect that the shortcomings noted stem from the wholesale migration of printed works into an electronic format, without redesigning it so as to fully exploit the functionality afforded by the Web environment. These shortcomings are not difficult to remedy, and fixing these would result in greatly enhanced convenience and searchability.
Despite the deficiencies noted, I would highly recommend the Columbia Granger’s World of Poetry as a resource for undergraduate literature courses in academic libraries. This product would be particularly beneficial for libraries needing to enhance relatively weak poetry collections
