Studies In Irish Literature is a full text CD‐ROM that contains the entire texts of three reference sources published by Greenwood Publishing: Dictionary of Irish Literature: Revised and Expanded Edition, Irish Playwrights, 1880‐1995: A Research and Production Sourcebook, and Modern Irish Writers: A Bio‐Critical Sourcebook. All three sources contain biographical materials with the authors used as access points, the dictionary also containing many important titles, terms, places, and genres associated with Irish literature. Overall, this compilation covers over 1,300 novelists, playwrights, poets, humorists, politicians, and publishers, and contains over 50,000 bibliographic entries. Greenwood Electronic Media has turned these three sources into a fully searchable Infobase, as it is called,utilizing an interface called Folio Views.
The overall interface will be familiar to those who work with many Windows programs, with a pull‐down menu on top, followed by a toolbar, a display bar, and then a window in which actual text content appears. Users may browse the table of contents, look at a hot list (lines of text captured from a search result), view a document itself in its entirety, or view two or more of these displays at once, in a frames mode. Boolean searching, truncation, and proximity search options are available, as is simple browsing.
While the interface is easy to use for the most part, users may still find themselves confused in some areas. For example, numerous hyperlinks are present throughout the text, but they can appear in different colors. Sometimes the hyperlinks are clear, but at other times they are highlighted in blue, similar to how they appear on the Web. Finally, the titles of the sources are in green, and these are also clickable. In the table of contents display, however, all items are in plain text, though they are all hyperlinks themselves. This is something that users will need to become familiar with in order to use this product effectively.
Fortunately, other features of this product are more obvious. All entries for each of the three texts are in alphabetical order. In the Contents display, users may click on any book icon to “open” a section, i.e. see its next level of contents displayed, or to “close” a section, i.e. hide the contents that are currently displayed. Within the document display, though, users will need to realize that when viewing a particular document, they are actually in the middle of one of the entire three texts. When they move the scroll bar up or down, they will be viewing either previous or later entries.
The search function is practically hidden, and would almost seem to encourage users to open and close “books” in the contents display or simply browse and click on the hyperlinks in the text rather than performing queries. While this approach can be sufficient to look up entries about particular authors, users may instead wish to find an instance where two authors may be compared, for example, or a particular genre or term associated with an author (especially in areas where the cross‐references do not appear under an author entry).
Users must also distinguish between the different sets of binoculars (representing regular query, advanced query, clear query, and author query) placed toward the right side of the upper tool bar. A further weakness is that users may not realize if they are limiting their search to only part of the database. They must pay attention to what is checked in the “Contents” display; if only one book or particular section is marked, the query will only search those areas. In general, the query windows seem to orient users toward browsing a list of given terms rather than performing searches ‐ not necessarily a bad thing, since humanities scholars in particular may enjoy browsing or skimming lightly over texts. Despite this, the database would be more user‐friendly as a whole if the search options were more prominent, instead of being nearly hidden within the toolbar.
Some searches give unexpected results. A search for “John Synge” as a phrase, for example, led to a troubleshooting window, alerting me to the fact that no such instances exist. The database does not provide a thesaurus to point users to more appropriate terms. “John Millington Synge” is the author’s official name, which can be found instead by searching the table of contents by last name.
Users must be aware of the overall database structure in order to use the print function effectively. “Records” here are simply blocks of texts, with a number of them often making up a single bibliographic entry. Users could easily be tempted to switch the print display to “all”, in the hopes of printing an entire entry within a book, when in fact this really means that the entire book would be printed! Librarians should instead instruct users to first select the text they want to print before printing, as the records in this database seem all too invisible and are indecipherable to anyone but librarians and database designers.
The Web version of this database is easier to use in some ways, i.e. all hyperlinks are the usual blue underlined text. Also, entries in the three books are clearly laid out in alphabetical order. On the other hand, users are forced into a frames environment after reaching a certain level. Using the “Back” button leads users nowhere, and the internal forward and back buttons only lead users to the next or previous page within the search results. Finally, download times are often slow, even though at least one “page” of each book is displayed at a time.
Overall, Studies in Irish Literature on CD‐ROM is a useful reference tool, as it is easier to browse the three texts more quickly in electronic form than in print, where only a limited table of contents and indexing are used. If users need to do more than browse, however, will they be able to recognize the query functions available to them? The nature of this interface seems to suggest that the answer to this question is “no”.
