A Celebration of Women Writers, according to its statement of purpose, attempts “to provide easy access to online information” about women writers, and this takes the form of a listing of links to biographical and bibliographical information, as well as links to online, full‐text versions of the authors' works or works about them. Most of these works are versions of print books transcribed either by the site's editor, or by others who have “donated” their time and material. Celebration is a completely volunteer project; although the University of Pennsylvania's Digital Library Initiative provides the site's hosting, Celebration is not officially affiliated with the university. The only criteria for an author to be included is that she be female, and has been officially “published”. Because of this, the breadth of work included on the site is expansive – everything from Beatrix Potter's children's stories to 1800s etiquette tracts can be found on the site. One finds famous names next to travel journals of Victorian aristocrats and diaries of harem girls. One thing most of the works have in common is that, due to copyright restrictions, they were published before 1923. There is also a small selection of more recent works that appear by permission of the copyright holder.
The site is extremely simple in its layout and design (everything but the header is black text on white background), and its search engine is relatively basic. Users can search an author's name, and narrow the search by date, country or ethnicity. The site has significant browsing capabilities, which help augment the basic navigation. Users can browse by author name (which is indexed alphabetically by last name with birth and death dates, where known) or by categories such as century, country, or ethnicity. There is also a section of Specialty Collections, which is a list of links to other sites about women writers with materials collected by subject (e.g. seventeenth century women poets).
These works are designed to be read online; the transcribed books are presented in an HTML format that makes the downloading of a full work problematic. A list of hyperlinked chapters and illustrations points the reader to the actual text. The works themselves are fascinating, and many are relatively rare; for this reason, A Celebration of Women Writers is a valuable and interesting resource. Some of the works found here are also available freely from other online sites – Celebration has provided Project Gutenberg, as well as other free sites, with several of its texts.
There is also a blog, which mostly documents the updates to the site, and information on what projects are underway or nearing completion. A sizeable number of books and authors are already available on the site, and new material is being added on a regular basis. Overall, this site is informative and interesting, although the addition of more robust searching capabilities would be a tremendous asset.
