The Canadian Literature Archive serves as an information gateway to many areas of Canadian Literature including fiction, drama, and poetry. This site has links to texts, bibliographies, literary publishers, archival images, and individual author sites. Emphasis is on English Canadian literature, although there are a few links to Quebecois writers. Maintained by David Arnason and Dennis Cooley, Professors of English at the University of Manitoba, this archive is a work in progress.
The Archive offers links to many interesting sites related to Canadian literature. The link to Canadian Writers on the Web provides some of the best information on this site. The Canadian Writers page is well organized and comprehensive. Scholars can find a variety of information on a long list of Canadian writers. The list includes Quebecois authors such as Anne Hébert and more popular writers such as Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies and Michael Ondaatje. Links include sample entries from the Canadian & World Encyclopedia, study guides to particular works, and critical articles. There are also links to writers who host Web pages. Some of the links, however, are dead and do not lead anywhere.
The Canadian Literature Archive also provides a link to the Prairie Culture Index (PCI), a site that offers information on Canadian Prairie life, past and present. The developers of PCI intend to create a searchable database of 3,000 links. Currently the site allows the user to browse an index of categories including literary magazines, writers’ festivals, author sites and publishers. Links also include literary magazines such as Prairie Books Now and Prairie Fire that provide a few online articles. The PCI page is interdisciplinary in nature and focuses on all aspects of Canadian Prairie life including art, history, literature, culture and political science.
Another site found on the Archive’s main page, Writers’ Organizations and Resources, has links to Canadian literary movements, publisher’s catalogs, literary magazines, Canadian Studies Centers, discussion groups and regional literature sites for Saskatchewan, Vancouver, Quebec and Newfoundland. The Playwrights Union of Canada link offers biographies, and lists newly released works. Links such as the Canadian Poetry Association and Northwest Passages: Canadian Literature Online provide research information on a large number of writers, playwrights and poets. Many links listed on this resource page are slow or dead. The writers’ organization page has not had an update in months.
The initial screen of the page has an attractive background color with simple graphics. There are no advertisements on the site, and visually the site is easy to read. The site offers a framed and a non‐framed version. The framed version has a better organized structure, but the designers of the site need to dedicate some time to reorganizing many of the pages in both versions. The main page of the site needs a discernible index or a table of contents. The current layout of the initial page makes it look as if the links were hastily added without much thought. The links on the main page appear in no particular order. A link to a bibliography on Michael Ondaatje is even misspelled. The main page would be much more navigable if the designers grouped the links under topics such as author sites, publisher sites, etc. By grouping the links under different headings, the overall length of the page would also decrease, making it easier to navigate. The Canadian Writers on the Web site is better organized, with all writers listed in alphabetical order, but the Writer’s Organizations and Resources page is also poorly organized and needs an index or a table of contents. None of the pages maintained by the Archive has any update information, so it is unclear when the sites were last updated. Many of the links on the page are preceded with a bright red NEW! Icon, but it is not clear how new these links really are to the page.
This Archive has the potential to provide all scholars of literature with a comprehensive reference guide to the diverse world of Canadian literature. No other comparable site exists. Some of the sites linked from the Archive, such as Northwest Passages: Canadian Literature OnLine, provide similar information in a clearer and more up‐to‐date format. The Archive provides information and links to scholarly and authoritative sites. This page could serve as a good starting point for students doing research on a particular Canadian author or literary movement. However, the archive is poorly organized and outdated at present. Many of its research links no longer exist and should be removed. The site is also difficult to navigate. Recommended with reservations for all academic libraries.
