The West Midlands
Regional Library System (WMRLS) are planning what they call a virtual Literature Centre. The West Midlands
Regional Library System (WMRLS) are planning what they call a virtual Literature Centre.
The initial funding for the project known as Lit-Net came about from West Midlands Arts Board (WMAB) and was initially allocated towards a feasibility study for a bricks and mortar centre. However they found little enthusiasm for a new capital investment of this nature, and turned to the World Wide Web to provide some of the same services on-line.
The project is now being run as a partnership between WMRLS, WMAB and Birmingham City Council's Readers and Writers Festival. Iain Stewart, who edited the literature promotion resource pack Shelf Talk, is acting as a consultant.
The venture is appealing for librarians as well as 'writers, readers, literature workers, and other interested parties in the West Midlands (and beyond)' to contact them with material and ideas. Contact is Geoff Warren : 0121 235 2673;
geoff.warren@dial.pipex.com.
Lit-Net will join a growing number of Web resources for writers and readers.
On a commercial level Chadwyck-Healey's Literature Online was launched in December and is now live.
An extension of their comprehensive (and expensive) CD Rom publications, it provides an index of links to other literary texts and resources on the Web, but this in itself is no more than a barely competent user could discover for himself using a free index like Yahoo.
The real strength of Literature Online is its own collection of 210,000 digital texts which are fully searchable not only by title and author but by keyword. If a user wants to find a dimly remembered poem, or scan through a few on a particular subject to find an apposite quotation it is perfect.
Subscription prices vary according to the number of resources you want to have access to. English Poetry alone is £2,000. The CD Rom would set you back £25,000.
Literature Online currently has a heavy emphasis on pre-Twentieth Century work and prides itself on bringing 'order to the anarchy of the Internet'.
But there are intitiatives which concentrate on contemporary work and which aspire to a certain spirit of creative anarchy.
Yorkshire and Humberside Arts have already funded a project called Unholy Island. The home page describes this as 'a slab of unrock in the middle, literally, of nowhere.' The idea is that as the site builds, writers and artists will 'give it form, content, pasts and presents'.
The current installations include Leeds Book Marks a partnership between Leeds Word Arena and Leeds Libraries. The poems on the site are by local poets and were featured on bookmarks given away on National Poetry Day 1996.
Also up is Map reading in St Petersburg, a collaboration between poet Sue Butler and photographer Marcus Tate (one of his pictures from the site is shown above). This piece illustrates one of the great strengths of the Web in presenting such work: the visual experience is one that only plush production values (and a huge budget) could hope to replicate in the print medium.
The 'founder of the island' is Alan McDonald, a playwright and scriptwriter who has also written computer manuals and Help systems. His own contribution to the project is Goddesses in Cyberspace.
Attached to the MA in Writing at Trent University in Nottingham, trace provides 'information about writing resources of all kinds and offers an arena for literary debate and discussion between writers and readers working in cyberspace and beyond'. It contains an interesting collection of links, particularly to experimental sites, including a guide to the more literary orientated Mud(Multi-User Domain)s, Moo (Mud Object Orientated)s and Mush(Multiple Shared Hallucination)s. These are text based virtual realities, which the user can interact with in real-time on screen, a bit like having a speaking part in a novel. Like writing fiction they offer the user the opportunity to change gender, species or form but unlike conventional writing the user discovers how the world reacts to them in their new form.
The warning is offered by trace that such programmes are highly addictive. 'Families,' it says, 'have been destroyed by members believing they were walking begonias in real-life as well as in virtual life.'
More than just a literary site, Geocities is a wholescale cultural engineering project. It offers users the opportunity to set up their own home pages at no charge within certain defined districts, so there's an Athens/Acropolis for philosophy, teaching and education, a Paris/Left Bank for the Bohemian arts and so on. The result offers the sort of serindipity that the Web is noted for without casting the net hopelessly wide. It's an intriguing concept on a number of levels and is well worth a look. You should start with the home page but if you are an admirer of James Joyce then Work in Progress, named of course after the working title of Finnegan's Wake, is absolutely essential viewing, one of the most comprehensive collections anywhere on the Net.
A list of literature related
web sites is available on the Arts Council of England's Poptel site.
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