In Internet years, Project Runeberg <http://www.lysator.liu.se/runeberg/> is a veteran. It has published Nordic Literature on the Internet since 1992, when a group of students at Linköping University began creating electronic literary texts. As technology improved, so did the site, which added HTML formatting, graphics, and digital images. The site currently has two hundred titles. Most of the works are in Swedish, but there are also Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Finnish texts in the collection. With a few exceptions, Project Runeberg only offers access to older literature that is out of copyright. Most texts are in their original language, but the overall site, including the search engine and the indexes, are in English.
The Project offers access to an eclectic and interesting group of texts including a link to scanned images of the very first issue of Aftonbladet, a nineteenth century liberal newspaper that often challenged the Swedish political establishment. There are also links to sheet music, scientific documents, and literary history texts. A site of particular interest is Americana, added to the Project in December 1998. This site contains works about American life in the nineteenth century and mainly describes the Swedish immigrant experience in North America. The link to the only English text on the site was dead, but some of the other documents had photos of nineteenth century America taken by Swedish travelers and/or immigrants such as August Palm. Even though users may not read Swedish, the Palm photographs and the English introductions to each work are interesting and useful. The Americana site also has links to Viking sagas including the Greenland Saga which describes Leif Eriksson’s discovery and exploration of North America.
The main page welcomes users to the site and lists seven groups of texts in order of when they first appeared. At the time of this writing, June 19, 1999, was the last time a text group was added, after previous frequent updates. These seven groups of text links render the first page very long. Removing the older additions would decrease the starting page size. A helpful Table of Contents and other Nordic Web links located at the bottom of the page would be easier to access if this page were less cluttered. The Table of Contents link brings users to an alphabetic catalog that lists all the works available in the database by author and title name. Users can also consult a “Tema” catalog that groups electronic texts together by common themes such as cooking, railroads or trolls.
The search engine is fairly simple and limited. Users can search by title or by author. The search engine will only help users who are familiar enough with Nordic literature to search by a known author or title. With author searching, users can narrow searches by country and by period. There is no keyword searching, but the thematic catalog may aid users in finding materials. Links to the alphabetic and thematic index appear on the top right corner of each page.
Navigating the overall site is fairly simple, although retrieving titles is sometimes slow because of the large size of many texts. Each document page contains both a scanned image and a text version. Users can view the page original and then scroll down to the text version. Documents are linked by page or chapter number. A small number of documents can be read on a PalmPilot, but according to the site it is still in an experimental stage.
The Project was last updated in April 2000, but it appears that no major changes have been made since 1999. The About link provides users with a great deal of information about the site. It is updated and maintained by volunteers who have not added any texts in over a year. The Project editors warn that “old facts might be obsolete, sometimes even dangerous” and “We try our best to select the best editions, and to copy them as accurately as we can. But there can always be mistakes”. These statements may weaken the authority of the texts on this site and should be brought to the attention of users.
Project Runeberg provides access to many interesting and important Nordic literary texts. The creators of this page cite University of Michigan’s Making of America (MOA) Project <http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/> and Project Gutenberg <http://www.gutenberg.net/> as inspiration for their site. No other comparable Nordic literature site exists. Most of the texts in this Project are in Swedish or other Nordic languages. Users would need to have some working knowledge of the language and also recognize that some language is archaic and possibly no longer used in modern times. The Project could serve as a useful resource for primary source material in Nordic Literature. However, users should recognize that the site is maintained by volunteers and that not all its texts are necessarily authoritative. Recommended for academic libraries that support a Nordic and/or Germanic literature program.
