The F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary (http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/index.html) was created in 1996 to celebrate the author’s 100th birthday while providing a central point of access to related events held during the year. For the long term, the creators also hope that the information on the site will “elevate awareness of a great American writer”. The University of South Carolina is an appropriate publisher, since the university’s Thomas Cooper Library holds the Matthew J. and Arlyn Bruccoli Collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald artifacts.
The site is a searchable archive of many different pieces of information. The attractive initial page displays an arrangement of clickable subject areas, including: Bibliographies; A Fitzgerald Chronology; and Writings by Fitzgerald. The 15 buttons allow users to easily see all categories of information in the site; this arrangement lends itself to uncomplicated navigation.
The academic institutional authorship indicates that the information held on the site is authoritative and well researched. Although the site was originally created for the centennial year, most of the subject area pages have been modified since 1996. Each page has a “last modified” date, which helps users to gauge the currency and maintenance philosophy of the site owners. Even though the author has no plans to add new content, literature appraisal of Fitzgerald is occasionally added to the site, and the Bruccoli Collection is a working collection.
In all, the site is very comprehensive. Its components include:
a basic biography and exhaustive chronology of Fitzgerald;
five essays and articles, which are available in full text;
six pages of facts about Fitzgerald;
six pages of quotations from, as well as about, Fitzgerald; and
writings by Fitzgerald, short stories reproduced in full text.
The writings are accompanied by historical references to when and where they were published, and accompanying pictures have been scanned on to the page in several instances.
The collection holds many unique artifacts that have been reproduced on the site, to great effect. The most notable section is the subject area entitled FSF: Voice and Film Clips. This small but invaluable page will let the users hear Fitzgerald recite two poems: John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” and John Masefield’s “On Beauty”. He also reads a Shakespeare Othello monologue. Users can also see Fitzgerald in a short and silent movie clip, filmed in the 1920s. Being able to listen to the author’s voice and see him moving puts a personal element on to the site. Anybody that has any interest in F. Scott Fitzgerald, whether personal or educational, will be enthralled by these multimedia gems (the film clip requires Windows Media Player, and the voice clips use Quicktime or RealAudio).
All of the multimedia resources available on this site are priceless and help the user put all of the information that they are gathering into historical and societal context. These resources also make the site unique among many other biographical Web sites. There are a number of sites that have a section dedicated to F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, the Minnesota Center for the Book, but many have hypertext links leading to this centennial page to use their resources. A site dedicated to the author with the same amount of detail and information as the USC site was not found. The Princeton University Library Manuscripts Division has a page that details the contents of their priceless collection of Fitzgerald artifacts which is similar to the USC Bruccoli Collection, but it is an inventory list rather than an interactive site of documents.
The site supports a search engine, available via a “Search” button housed on the home page. The search engine used is Infoseek, and users can search the F. Scott Fitzgerald Centenary exclusively or the entire WWW. It is a simple search query form which does not include any search tips. However, the site is small and specific enough that there is little opportunity to suffer many false drops. For example, a search for “Gatsby” returns 37 hits, a manageable set of documents to scan for information.
On each page there is a button to return to the home page as well as a button labeled “Comments or Queries”, which allows users to compose an E‐mail to those responsible for the site. I received a response to my exploratory E‐mail one day after it was sent, a sign of a well‐maintained site. Even though the site was born out of the centennial celebrations, the E‐mail responder stated that the site was to be kept on the Web “indefinitely” and is now functioning primarily as an informational and educational resource.
In conclusion, I highly recommend this site. It is informative on many levels, and I would advise both new and experienced students of F. Scott Fitzgerald as well as of American literature in general to visit. It is a good starting point to learn the basics about this influential writer, and users are given additional topic areas that they can use if more in‐depth research is required. This site is highly recommended for academic libraries.
