Literature Online (LION) is a searchable,full‐text database that includes English, American and African‐American poetry as well as English fiction and drama. While the years covered in each of these collections vary widely, LION strives to represent different literatures and all types of literary points of view through e‐texts, author biographies, and the full‐text or abstracts of well‐known literary journals. Web sites that have been selected by Chadwyck‐Healey editors are also an important part of the offered collection, and are available through the various searches that can be performed. Author biographies are composed from data received from H.W. Wilson. The secondary sources provided in LION are the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL) as well as the Literary Journals Index Full Text (LIFT). ABELLprovides citations to works that cover the entire span of English literature, while LIFT provides access to over 200 literary journals. Only 31 of these full‐text titles in LIFT are from issues published in 1998 and after. There is no access to foreign language journals, but there is a broad range of English‐speaking countries represented in LIFT.
Launched in 1996, Chadwyck‐Healey recently updated the design of the LION site. Version 2.0 is easier to use and to navigate through the many different features available. The database has been developed for optimal use with Netscape Navigator 3.0 or higher, or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher, although it will operate with older versions of these browsers. The new construction of the pages in this version makes them very user‐friendly, although Java is used in the site navigation menu on the side of each page. This may cause some problems with older browsers. Like any Web page, the loading of the pages depends on many different factors. Generally, LION pages do not take long to load, but if you try to use it at a busy time of day, delays may be experienced. Additionally, depending on your subscription option there may be a limit on the number of concurrent users on LION; some institutions may find difficulty with this during busy times. While there does not appear to be a “schedule” that is used to update database information, updates on various aspects of the data occur on somewhat of a regular basis. A full history of the content of LION is included in the Web site.
The search screens are search specific and straightforward: Find authors, Find works, Browse authors and works, Search texts, and Search secondary sources. Links to all of these are available on the main page, along with a link to search other, individual pieces of literature that can be purchased in addition to the main database. Links to the other types of search screens, as well as the Help screen, are available at the top of the screen, no matter what type of search is being performed. While it may seem excessive to have individual screens for each type of search, this makes for more focused searching. The options provided for each search are direct and helpful to the search at hand. There is only one level of searching, but Boolean operators, truncation symbols, and proximity searching are supported.
Search results are easily navigable. A nice feature of the LION search results is a bar across the top of the result screen that provides information on how many hits were retrieved from each type of source: LIFT, ABELL, and Web sites. Links to “works by” and “works about” an author are provided with every search. A recently added feature is the ability to e‐mail search results to oneself and others. LION encourages users to send articles and information to other people, which is the downfall of this feature. If users wanted to e‐mail information only to themselves, they would have to fill in their e‐mail address twice, as there are two required fields for e‐mail addresses. At present, search results cannot be downloaded to a disk.
There are three different subscription options available for purchase by institutions: complete, poetry collection, and the English corpus. While these three vary in the amounts of the LION poetry and prose collections that they contain, all include full availability to the secondary resources ABELL and LIFT, as well as the database’s indexed Web sites and the biographical information of the over 1,000 authors included in the database. As mentioned previously, there is a good amount of online help for using LION. However, this is not duplicated in print format. There are also many links to support from the company itself. Chadwyck‐Healey’s Web site, (http://www.chadwyck.com), provides not only telephone numbers and e‐mail addresses, but also technical FAQs as well as a form with which to send in questions.
When comparing LION to Gale’s Literature Resource Center (LRC), it is not surprising to find very little overlap in the journal titles that provide full text. In fact, if you subscribe to both products, Gale will provide a link to LION’s Web site within its LRC package. This raises the question: why choose LION? Chadwyck‐Healey does an excellent job in its treatment of authors from English‐speaking countries and provides a good range of information in both full‐text and abstract form. LION is constantly being updated, with new collections being added that will only enhance its usefulness to literature scholars at any institution. Recommended for all academic libraries.
