Literary Index is a selective collection of links to important literature related web resources. Because it is designed to be a “descriptive meta‐index” rather than a comprehensive list of links, a brief description is included with each resource. Additionally, the resources are divided into seven categories: Literature Indices; Doing Literary Research; English Departments and Literary Institutes; Books and Presses; Archives of Electronic Texts; Composition, Rhetoric, and Writing; and Teaching in Literature. These categories highlight different aspects of literary studies and are likely to appeal to different audiences, whether they are looking for scholarly resources, electronic text collections or teaching materials.
However, more than half of the links included in the Literary Index are broken and point to dead‐ends. This causes many “page cannot be found” errors and is a major usability problem, as it is difficult to weed through the errors in order to find working links. There is no indication of when the web site was last updated but, given the large number of dead links, it seems unlikely that the Index is still being maintained. In terms of design, Literary Index has a simple, easy to use layout consisting of one page with text and links. The page is divided into seven sections, one for each of the categories mentioned earlier. Navigational links to each category are available at the top of the page and easy to find. The text and links are rather difficult to read because a small font size is used. Since the page is almost entirely text, this is a problem. Also, though there are only two graphics on the page, one of which is broken and not displaying.
There are many web sites that index literary studies web resources. For example, both Voice of the Shuttle (http://vos.ucsb.edu/) and Literary Resources on the Net (http://andromedia.rutgers.edu/ ∼ jlynch/Lit) provide comprehensive directories of important websites divided by subject area. However, the strength of the Literary Index is that it is designed to provide a “selective” list of important literary studies resources in the areas of research, general interest, and teaching. It is unfortunate that this list is not maintained better.
Overall, despite having a useful purpose of providing a selective and descriptive list of important literary studies resources, the Literary Index is simply not useful due to the number of broken links. There are other, more up to date, web sites available to find this information, which makes the usefulness of this outdated site questionable. I would not recommend it.
