Although eighteenth-century studies are alive and well in European and North American university life, and there are many sites dealing with historical material of the period and online research projects such as scholarly editions of letters or papers, online access to resources linked to eighteenth-century literature, as opposed to other material, is surprisingly limited. Popular texts, particularly those figuring widely on syllabuses, are readily available: it is not hard to find sites providing certain major eighteenth-century works in English and one or two other languages (as well as English translations of works originally written in other languages). But other than these "classics," the number of works available is quite small. Any eighteenth-century literary text at all specialist — especially one in a language other than English1— is likely to be difficult or impossible to find online. Unless, that is, the text is not only literary but has other interest as a philosophical or political essay. If it is not hard to find examples of Rousseau's É mile, ou de l'éducation, it is less because it is a novel (of sorts) than because it had a significant influence on theories of education in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
In addition, as is generally true of the present generation of electronic resources, there is a clear focus on quantity over quality. Most available digital resources connected with eighteenth-century literature appear to be aimed at the secondary-level (high school) student, and the materials provided are generally unimpressive in both substance and presentation. There is little attempt at scholarship; critical annotation is often absent or basic, and the text itself (when it does not consist simply of page images) is frequently error-strewn. Even leaving aside the actual accuracy of the text, it is common to find that no information has been provided about the printed source from which it has been taken; when the source is known, it often proves to come from an uncritical popular edition of the nineteenth or early twentieth century — i.e., the digitizer has gone for material in the public domain, without any regard to reliability or accuracy. Texts are provided without contexts, and in their rawest and most technologically unsophisticated state; even the visual presentation is frequently uninviting.2 Clearly we are still in the early stages of electronic provision, and more recent sites show the promise of more usability and a more sophisticated approach to literary works and their creators.
Most websites in eighteenth-century literary studies have a page or pages of bibliographical information — either citation references for the material presented on the site, or information about books, articles, and other studies related to the material —and another page containing links to related sites. There are also a small number of eighteenth-century sites whose primary purpose is to provide this information and in fact to point the user in other directions.
Sadly, many — perhaps most — online bibliographies of eighteenth-century literary studies clearly show their "book-bound" origins. They typically offer interminable and unstructured lists or large slabs of text, both of which are difficult to use unless searchers already know what they are looking for. A quote from a typical offender suggests (perhaps with unintentional irony) the disjunction that can exist between creator and user: "These bibliographies should help scholars lost in a flood of information to find helpful printed sources."3 But they don't: instead the bibliographies take the form of over fifty print pages of single-spaced text without a single hotlink in sight. That is not to say that such lists do not have their value, for they do bring obscure and scattered information together and make it available in some shape; but they can hardly be seen as an example of how digital technology can aid study or scholarship, for the same or better could be (and frequently is) provided in printed format.4 Even a site like Benoît Melançon's bibliographical journal XVIIIe siècle: bibliographie, which provides an excellent up-to-date listing of eighteenth-century studies (of all kinds, not only literary), gives citations in just flat text, with the occasional link to a review. While reviews can be very useful, the logical next step — to provide links from the bibliography entries to the works themselves or to holding libraries — is almost never forthcoming, presumably for the simple reason that the amount of time and effort that would have to be invested to create direct links for all (or even a significant number of) entries in such bibliographies would make it prohibitively expensive. Just occasionally a bibliography site in a university may provide links to the university library; but it is clear that it will not happen on a wide scale until the technology is in place to permit the process to be automated.
A step up technologically from the bibliographies, link sites or metapages frequently share the same defects of presentation: the lists, though they consist of links to related sites rather than citation references, are often similarly interminable and similarly hard to navigate through.5 A major problem with these sites is "link rot": as digital resources — and not only the obscure ones — are migrated or taken offline, more and more of the links on the page become inactive or point to reroute pages.6 This is of course a common problem with all kinds of online resources (though no less irritating for that); in the case of link sites, however, it is a problem that tends to neutralize the very raison d'être of the resource itself.
At the same time, it would be wrong to give an impression that all link sites are opaque and out of date. One such site should probably be among of the first stops for any searcher looking for digital resources in eighteenth-century literature: Jack Lynch's "labor of love," the Eighteenth-Century Resources site at Rutgers. The site as a whole is very user-friendly; and the Literature links page is comprehensive, well laid out and well signposted, and includes invaluable notes indicating the contents of the sites linked to, and any problems that might be expected. Lynch's claim to have "an up-to-date and nearly comprehensive list of e-texts available on the internet," if at first blush hardly over-modest, is in fact an accurate description of what he provides (he also provides a separate index for the e-texts). However, the other resources linked by Lynch are of no less interest, as they include aids such as bibliographies, chronologies, images, and guides of other sorts. It would not be an exaggeration to say that in most cases, a trip to Eighteenth-Century Resources will point academics and students at least in the direction of whatever they need, as long as it is actually in existence online. Another site that shows what can be done (though on a smaller scale, and not wholly dedicated to the eighteenth century) is The Literary Gothic website. Its pages on writers such as Addison, Beckford, and Walpole are elegant, clear, and, like Lynch's, apparently completely up to date, no mean feat.
Both these sites concentrate on literature in English. A first stop for those studying literature in other languages would be the ACRL's Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature (WESS WEB). This site links to material in a relatively wide spread of (Western European) languages, ranging from Catalan and Provençal to Swedish and Romanian, though the lion's share is taken as ever by material in French, German, and Italian. A second stop for both — and one highly praised by Lynch — is the Voice of the Shuttle, which has links for both English and non-English literature. There is in fact only a limited amount of literature not in English, and as the site is not devoted solely to eighteenth-century literature and only the French section of the site provides a chronological division of the material, in most cases the searcher will need to hunt around. Link sites in other languages are fewer, although French again has a good number; among the most comprehensive are Littérature francophone virtuelle at Swarthmore University's ClicNet and Athena's Textes Français. The French Ministère des affaires étrangéres and Ministère de la culture also provide numerous links to literature sites.7 Again, these sites do not specialize in the eighteenth century, so that finding the site is only the first stage, as it will then be necessary to do further searches (typically by author name) to find the specific subset that is wanted. A third and no less important link site is The European Library,8 which provides access to many of the national libraries of Europe — many of which have significant holdings of e-texts in their own languages, or links to digital libraries (see below).
The number of sites devoted specifically to eighteenth-century literature is vanishingly small. In general, eighteenth-century e-texts appear as a small subsection (or, quite frequently, simply mixed in with other material) in sites devoted either to literature in general, or to eighteenth-century history or culture. There are exceptions, the best known probably being ECCO (Thomson-Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), which is a wonderfully rich resource — at least for those whose institutions are able to afford it. Among the most important of the general literature sites are Project Gutenberg and the University of Virginia's Electronic Texts Center, both of which have plenty of eighteenth-century literary texts. However the sources, where known, are generally material in the public domain, derived from uncritical early (nineteenth-century) editions, with basic HTML tagging and no editorial notes. Other general sites are often more interesting, and some include a fair number of literary works. A good example is the Liberty Fund's Online Library of Liberty, with texts — many of them literary, including book-length essays — from some seventy-five eighteenth-century writers. However, although the editions are generally scholarly and plenty of biographical, historical, and bibliographical information is provided on the site, the texts themselves are PDF or flat HTML with relatively little in the way of linking either internal or external. The series of texts under the rubric Storiografia, erudizione e filosofia nell'Europa settecentesca in the Electronic Library of Historiography at the University of Florence,9 fewer in number, are elegantly presented but provide only minimal scholarly annotation or background.
Text sites containing eighteenth-century literary resources cover the entire range from the very static to the very dynamic and interlinked. Many collections, including major ones such as ECCO, are primarily devoted to the provision of page images. This format (sometimes with basic OCR indexing) is a valuable substitute for rare books collections, but should not be confused with critical editions of eighteenth-century texts. Following on from the provision of page images is the transcription of the images with basic HTML formatting; hyperlinks, if there are any, are usually restricted to footnoting. They are ideal for word searches (assuming the text is accurate), but otherwise of limited usefulness. Happily, not all websites stop at page images or flat HTML. The up-and-coming generation of eighteenth-century literary sites show a more imaginative and integrated approach to texts, with more internal links — and external ones, too, to other material of different types; but are only just beginning to explore the possibilities of mixed media and interactive approaches.
The fact that page scans give primacy to the book as an object is reflected in the preference for this form of digitization above all by libraries that hold the books. A number of major national libraries have modeled their digitization projects to a greater or lesser extent on the ECCO format, although, taking advantage of technological progress in the meantime, their page images are often high resolution and in color. The Colecciones digitales of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid contain a large set of digitized material (though in this case the quality of the scans is not very high), together with presentations of important authors from the eighteenth century as well as other periods. The Biblioteca Nacional Digital from the Portuguese Biblioteca Nacional has a more developed form of the same model, providing scans of over 1,000 eighteenth-century Portuguese literary works together with bibliographical and historical information, and many internal and external library links. Icelandic literature of the eighteenth century is almost too well served, with two official digital library projects: Timarit, based on the Icelandic National Library's holdings, and Saganet,10 a joint project between the National Library and Cornell. Again, both projects have chosen to give only page scans — of excellent quality and high resolution. The Swedish Project Runeberg similarly provides scan images of a large number of Swedish (and also some Icelandic, German, and other) writers, including some from the eighteenth century, as does the Polska Biblioteka Internetowa, for eighteenth-century Polish literature.11 The Czech National Library's Manuscriptorium virtual library,12 though in its early stages, is more ambitious. At present the works are presented as page scans only (with extremely detailed bibliographic information); but the project information indicates that they intend to capture the text in "pragmatic editions" with XML tagging, thus combining page images with something close to a true digital edition.
The great majority of e-text sites offer not page scans (or not only page scans) but keyed or OCR'd texts of varying degrees of sophistication. The official sites providing "national collections" or "digital libraries" of electronic texts tend to provide a fairly flat text with basic HTML tagging and few links. This can be seen, for example, in the official Biblioteca Româneasca, where the Romanian literary texts included lack bibliographical information, chronologies and dates for writers or works, and no links outwards. Much the same is true of the (still limited) eighteenth-century collections of the Russian State Library's Open Russian Electronic Library (OREL) and the Serbian Projekt Rastko,13 as well as the Portuguese Projecto Vercial, which gives extracts from the writings of many eighteenth-century authors under the rubric Literatura Neoclas-sica, but no links. The Dansk Nationallitterært Arkiv,14 which forms part of the Dansk Koniglige Bibliotheket website, provides a good collection of literature from the period (an important century in Danish letters) in an attractive and user-friendly interface; but again little is given other than the texts and basic bibliographic details. This style of provision, where an attractive presentation does not quite hide the fact that the texts are flat HTML with few or no notes and no links, can be seen in numerous other sites. Even literary sites as well known as the University of Augs-burg's Augustana, which sets out to provide a wide range of European literature,15 provide only bibliographical source information; others, such as the University of Gdansk's elegant Wirtualna Biblioteka Literatury Polskiej, which provides a large number of Polish works, give no bibliographical information and no notes, although in the University of Gdansk's case biographical information on the writers is provided, along with some illustrations.
The lack of additional information, either biographical or contextual (or, more rarely, bibliographical), may be due to the use of an uncritical base print edition; but sometimes it is a matter of editorial choice. In the case of an online literature project such as Bibliopolis's Classiques Garnier collection in Gallica classique (of which eighteenth-century French literature forms a small part of the whole), a deliberate decision has been taken not to have notes, as the works derive from the Garnier editions but all the critical apparatus has been removed.16 The suspicion that this is for purely financial reasons, in order not to harm sales of the print edition, is hard to avoid. In other cases, like the elegantly presented collection of the French Ministère des affaires étrangères under the rubric livre et écrit, the complete lack of annotation, critical apparatus, or links of any kind is more likely to be in order not to put off the casual enquirers who appear to be the intended audience (to judge from the authors and texts provided).17
More recently, a small number of e-text sites have begun to reflect the possibilities offered by online presentation. The digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren (DBNL) is one of these next-generation sites. Beautifully presented and very friendly, it is easy to navigate straight to the texts in HTML, with PDFs of the page scans if wanted; and the large number of eighteenth-century Dutch texts (over 200 of them, in a separate section) is contextualized by a further listing of secondary literature, also available in HTML, and a "ladder" of links to more than seventy e-journals, together with images, bibliographies, maps (including plenty of contemporary ones), and even audio material (readings), as well as dense project pages linking authors and materials thematically.18 Also worth watching is the Project Laurens Janszoon Coster, which aims to provide more interactive electronic editions of "klassieke Nederlandstalige litera-tuur"; a good start has been made on a broad range of Dutch literature, though as yet it is still relatively flat and there is not much eighteenth-century material.
The Bibliothéque nationale de France has its own "bibliothéque numérique," Gallica, one section of which (Gallica classique) contains an impressive selection of important eighteenth-century texts.19 This is fully interlinked with the BNF's catalogue, so full bibliographical details are available. Some thought has also gone into the thematic linking, which works well. Even more interesting in some ways are the BNF/Gallica Dossiers, half a dozen mini-sites created with thematic cross-linkage between works; a fair number of the dossiers are connected with eighteenth-century themes. Slightly counter-intuitive at first, they are designed with great flair and clearly thought through with care to put together interesting and sometimes unexpected collections of texts. (The range of documents is broad, as befits a national library, and the emphasis is probably more documentary than literary, though many of the texts are literary works.)
One of the more interesting new-generation sites in this field — more interesting, among other reasons, because it gives an indication of the possibilities by coming at the texts from an unusual angle — is the British Library's Literary Landscapes, which associates various literary texts with the (British) geographical locations they are based in — though only a couple of eighteenth-century texts are reviewed, and the illustrations are frustratingly small.20 Another interesting experiment in a different direction is the University of Sherbrooke's Callisto, which links together major eighteenth-century writers in English, French, and German; however, the material available (flat HTML with few links) does not quite live up to the clever introductory pages.
Another excellent example of what can be done, apparently aimed at a secondary/ high-school level although it could in truth be of interest to undergraduates as well, is the Norton Topics Online website. Here we have what is in principle a hybrid work, as the topics are given with links indicated to the Norton Anthology of English Literature (NAEL); nevertheless, although they are there in the first place to provide context, they also include short texts themselves. The organization of the site repays examination. A side bar provides access to the material, either in a structured way via Topics, Review, or Archive or by a simple Search; within these come further subdivisions. It is intuitive and clearly signposted; the range of material is impressive, including both well-captioned contemporary images (engravings, paintings) and audio readings of some material as well as a multiple-choice quiz (technically simple, but cleverly thought out). The texts are well chosen, being of a length suitable for reading on screen; and they all have editorial notes.
Genre is not (yet) a word that has much meaning in digital resources. Certainly there is no watertight division between the e-text sites discussed above, particularly the new-generation sites with their contextualization and interlinking, and what one might call "project" sites: websites based on teaching or research rather than simply the provision of texts. Particularly close to the new-generation e-text sites, to the extent that they shade imperceptibly into them,21 the teaching sites properly speaking provide material for students and their teachers. They are usually built on broad themes; there are for instance a number of sites on such topics as Romanticism or theater.
Other project sites are created not so much for students as for groups doing research into either individuals or, more commonly, literary themes or areas. There is again little sharp distinction between research and teaching sites, particularly as many research sites also provide a good deal of general information and may even deliberately make available a large amount of material of a non-specialist nature in order to broaden interest in the project theme. Closely related to these research sites are the e-journals: indeed, the distinction between such sites and e-journals in the strict sense of the term is hardly more than one of point of view, given that a truly interactive research site will be encouraging (or at least welcoming) much the same kind of interaction between academics and teachers as takes place within the framework of a proper online journal.
Finally, those sites created by groups working on digital editions of the works of individual writers or individual works are among the most interesting, and have the potential to be the most technically advanced. However, there are very few sites of this sort in eighteenth-century literary studies; most eighteenth-century writers whose works are being edited digitally are better known as scientists or public figures — see, e.g., the Rousseau Studies website, Rousseau being incomparably better known as a philosopher and political theorist.
Other project sites are designed for high-school or college students and follow a similar pattern to sites providing only texts. Many are relatively primitive and not particularly user-friendly. The Johnson Society site, though somewhat unfriendly in appearance, is more intelligent than most. On the other hand a project site like the University of Virginia's British Poetry 1780–1910, though it describes itself as a "hypertext archive of scholarly editions," in fact contains little material that could possibly qualify as hypertext. The links are basic; there are no annotations, and each hypertext page is linked to low-quality page scans or other images. Nor is there even much evidence that the editions are scholarly in any meaningful sense. A third site, The Dictionary of Sensibility, shows an intelligent approach to teaching the theme; it introduces the searcher to the concept through a list of a couple of dozen terms, each leading to a series of short readings with glosses to orient the reader. Although the organization and layout is not very attractive, the material is good; however, the site does not really live up to expectations as apart from a couple of indigestible bibliographies there is little additional material.
A good example of the general research site in eighteenth-century literature is Barry Russell's Le Théâtre de la Foire à Paris.22 Containing as it does a wealth of documentation of many different types, it is a resource of real value for those studying theater history; however, the primitive format makes it very unintuitive to use. Quite different is the larger research site to which it is linked, CÉ SAR (the Calendrier É lectronique des Spectacles sous l'Ancien régime et sous la Révolution), a "dynamic online database" which covers French theater right through to end of the eighteenth century. Considerable thought has obviously gone into putting structure into the immense amount of information available, and providing as comprehensive as possible a set of "entry points."23 And there are links to further resources considered "external" to the historical data that lies at the heart of the resource: a number of e-books, some hyperlinked and others page images, "treatises" (books published during the period), and — potentially even more interesting — "press," i.e., contemporary press reviews of plays, though the reviews tend to take the form of very tightly cut "snippets" with no context. A serious effort has been made to explain at every stage what the searcher is looking at, but the information is presented in a rather unfriendly "database" style which is clearly aimed at the researcher, not the student.
Many other research sites are much more user-friendly. The University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online provides a timeline with links to a wide range of (among others) eighteenth-century poets and their works, with impressively complete bibliographical information (including the rhyme scheme and the poetic form) about not only the original edition but the electronic edition as well. The search is well constructed, as are the cross-links between different poets who influenced one another, their biographies, their poems, the glossary, other poems by the same poet, and so on. There are few critical annotations to individual poems, but longer critical evaluations are easily reached.
A more advanced multimedia project site, Alexander Huber's exemplary Thomas Gray Archive, contains not only scrupulously edited and copiously annotated texts but also concordances, links to page images, and even audio-visual clips of recital of some of Gray's works. The two very different project sites within the Blake Web,24 a kind of "umbrella" site by Steven Marx at Cal Poly University, also repay examination. The Blake Multimedia Project, a teaching project, uses a hypertext edition containing all the illustrations of several of Blake's works — an example of an intelligent approach to the author, given the importance of the image in Blake's work. However, the project is showing its age, as the hypertext edition is only in the format of downloadable HyperCard files. The second site, the hypermedia William Blake Archive, contains a broad range of resources on Blake, including biography, glossary, and articles, together with many images. The material is well put together, with exhaustive annotations of all the editions, and transcriptions as well as images of the text; there are also (an unusual detail) detailed descriptions of each of the images, thus permitting searches of these as well as of the text.
Even more comprehensive is the project site Romantic Circles. This sophisticated website features a blog, scholarly resource links to texts, densely annotated image banks, chronologies, some very complex hypertext electronic editions (though most are of nineteenth-century texts), reviews, teaching guides, and a MOO25 for "discussion, meetings and gaming." In Jack Lynch's words, O si sic omnes! It is perhaps telling that it is not devoted to a wholly eighteenth-century theme.
Online journal or e-journal is an elastic term. Such e-journals as Eighteenth-Century Life,26 or Eighteenth Century Studies,27 provide their material in generated PDFs or in HTML with footnote links; but they are print journals that are stored electronically, rather than online journals in any real sense.28 A more developed format of online journal with significant material on the eighteenth century is Romanticism on the Net, which is (as its name suggests) electronic only. Designed as it is for online delivery, it is easy to search, elegantly presented, and more readable than many other online publications; nevertheless, although it is all in HTML it has few links other than those to footnotes. Much the same can be said of another online journal containing eighteenth-century literary material, Early Modern Literary Studies, though it is not as friendly in appearance.29
Very different from all of these is the University of Maryland's Romantic Circles Praxis Series, the journal of the Romantic Circles project site discussed above, which has been created with a clear intention to make full use of the possibilities offered by the electronic medium. The series is described as aiming to use "computer technologies to investigate critically the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism," which at first glance looks like a claim to some form of complex software-driven research into the text — a claim which is not obviously substantiated, and one which may divert the user from the sophisticated way the technology is used in the presentation of the e-journal. Although inelegant in layout and style, it is exceptionally integrated, with links from author to abstract to article and links within documents to popup notes.
One of the few more sophisticated eighteenth-century edition projects, The Spectator Project is still in its early stages — it has got as far as providing high-resolution color images of the original newssheets. While these are of considerable interest from a literary and publishing history point of view, as the editors point out, a scholarly edition and further contextual information are still awaited; and the fact that a good proportion of the newssheets are not yet digitized limits their usefulness for the time being. If the editors' intentions are followed through, however, it will be a site to watch.
As we saw at the outset, the digitization of eighteenth-century literature — even in English where it is furthest advanced — is still in its early stages. The vast majority of text sites are quite primitive, delivering either PDFs of pages or little if anything more than minimally tagged, flat HTML pages of indefinite length. Structure is kept to a minimum; even headings are often tagged not as headings but simply as bold, indented, or (occasionally) centered text. The relationship between the text and the technology appears to follow the system of the cook in one of Saki's short stories, who "nourished an obstinate conviction that if you brought rabbit and curry powder together in one dish a rabbit curry would be the result."30
It is perhaps not surprising that little thought appears to have been given to the ways in which the texts might be used; it is clearly felt that it is enough to make the material available, in however rudimentary a form. In many cases this is true enough, and the digitizer has indeed done the academic community a real service simply in providing any sort of electronic version of these texts — texts which might otherwise be difficult of access, texts which can now be worked with and searched in a way not previously possible.
But while it is clear that academic work methods are changing and that electronic texts, even in their most rudimentary form, are opening up new possibilities to researchers and students, it is also becoming increasingly clear that this is no longer enough. Search for a quote from Addison's Spectator on the internet and you may find twenty answers — but they will not all be the same answer, and most will give only the bare details. It can be useful for a quick check that the quote is correct: but then, how can one even be sure which of the twenty versions is in fact accurate? And in most cases you can go no further: no editorial comment, no contextualization, no links, not even any bibliographical details. For different reasons, this "naked" text is in fact as useless to the student as it is to the researcher. Scholarship, however undemanding, needs some sort of background to the text if one is to avoid a sterile and facile subjectivity.
There is, besides, a danger in the old "more is better" paradigm that simply counts pages. For the time being, no literary text more than a couple of pages long (if that) can be comfortably read on-screen; and while it is true that longer texts can be printed out, there is a certain perversity in the concept of laboriously scanning or keying in long texts in order that they may be printed out again so that they can be used. That, surely, is a case of using the computer to do less well what the publishing industry can usually do far better and more efficiently.
There is more of a point to the exercise if the intention is to make available page scans of eighteenth-century publications, as ECCO has done on a grand scale; after all, even if they are not quite incunabula, eighteenth-century editions can be both expensive and rare. (Academics may of course be more interested in questions that can only be answered by reference to the physical volume, but these generally fall rather within the orbit of history of the book rather than strict literary criticism.) But here too it is not the fact that they are online that is important: a print-out — or a facsimile volume — would be much easier for most researchers to use. Unless the images are (for example) of such high resolution that they enable one to see details not visible to the naked eye, or the software makes it possible to examine the images in some way that cannot be done with the originals, they do not represent a technological step forward, but merely a convenient storage facility.
Where next for the online resource in eighteenth-century literature? Useful developments are likely to take place in two separate directions. The student and the more general reader will probably get most out of sites that give context to the text, through linkages to other related texts and a dense network of significant material (not only texts but images and audio), along the lines of Romantic Circles or Norton Topics Online. For the academic specialist, a truly interactive research site like the Thomas Gray Archive will facilitate new electronic editions and permit further annotation and collaboration between scholars. In fact the Thomas Gray site, which contains both scholarly and more general material, may be a paradigm of one type of next-generation online resource in the field. This new generation is already making it clear that not only is quality more important than quantity, it is also possible to have both. Though there will continue to be a place for ECCO and other page-image collections, particularly as a part of research library and archive sites where they will provide an important service to scholars and researchers of all kinds, the "never mind the quality, feel the width" style of online provision is going to look increasingly out of date over the next few years.
1 Exception can possibly be made of French and German; nevertheless, even though the provision of e-texts of eighteenth-century works in these two languages is relatively good, it can hardly compare with what is available in English.
2 Common faults include the use of inelegant and hard-to-read typefaces such as Courier, and patterned or dark backgrounds that "lose" the text. The use of psychedelic colors is, mercifully, on the decrease.
3 Jim May's Bibliographies.
4 Bibliography sites often seem to be the work of individuals and to suffer from the effects of hobbyist's myopia: i.e., because the builders of such sites are so close to their subject, they can find it hard to appreciate that the information needs to be mediated in a way that makes sense to the non-expert.
5 A site like eserver's Eighteenth Century Studies gives a fair example of how user-unfriendly this can be.
6 As well as providing reminders for users to update their bookmarks, reroute pages sometimes underline the length of time since the last update of the link site by indicating when the site migrated to its new address. ńrature of the site Cul-
7 The page Livres et Litte ture.fr permits searches of a very wide range of material — most of which, however, is not eighteenth-century.
8 The site distinguishes full members (who have direct links to their websites) from associated members, but there is a clear intention to have all European national libraries as full members sooner or later.
9 It is the largest of the collections in ELIOHS.
10 The project (as its name suggests) focuses on saga material, but includes eighteenth-century editions of, and material on, the sagas.
11 Cf. the Croatian National Library's very sophisticated digitized volumes (scans) on its Digitalizirana bastina pages, although these include no eighteenth-century work as yet.
12 There are versions of the site in Czech and English.
13 The site also includes links to Montenegrin, Romanian, Albanian, and other Slav and Balkan literature.
14 DNA or Danish National Archive of Literature, drawn largely from the Arkiv for Dansk Litteratur.
15 It is, for example, one of the very few sites to provide literature in Yiddish; and it also provides material in Latin, Greek, and medieval languages. Many of the texts promised are, however, still on the stocks and the great majority of texts it provides at the time of writing are in German.
16 Bibliopolis features just twelve texts (including four collections) by seven authors.
17 A few complete texts are provided in RTF; others are extracts in HTML. A single "star" text is presented as a separate section with images, detailed discussion, and links. At the time of writing, the section — entitled La Quintinie et le potager du roi — is based on La Quintinie's Instructions (1690) and includes extracts, descriptions, and links to related sites including Versailles and the É cole natio-nale supérieure du paysage. The page contains little eighteenth-century material.
18 At the time of writing there is just one theme page, on Antwerp, with images, text, and lots of links to authors and works.
19 Not always (possibly for copyright reasons) are the best editions available: thus the works of Voltaire in Gallica are taken from the Beuchot and Hachette editions, not the Moland or the ongoing Oxford æuvres complètes.
20 The full images are so small that most of the detail is not distinguishable; they can be viewed in close-up, but only in very small sections at a time.
21 The decision to deal with the Norton Topics Online site under e-texts, for instance, is arguably largely arbitrary: the determining factor in this case was that the site is a commercial one whereas project sites tend to be produced by academics and teachers.
22 The site contains mainly seventeenth-century material.
23 The complete set of entry points is: People, Troupes, Places, Titles, Dates, Publications, Publishers, Libraries, Images. For a less advanced English-language equivalent, see the student project run by Patricia Craddock, The World of London Theater, 1660–1800.
24 The site also contains an e-book, Marx's Youth Against Age: Generational Strife in Renaissance Poetry, in a surprisingly low-tech HTML version without even internal links to the footnotes.
25 Multi-user domain Object Oriented: a computer program that allows multiple users to connect via the internet to a shared database of "rooms" and other objects, and interact with each other and the database in synchronous time.
26 Hosted by HighWire.
27 Hosted by JStor, LION, and Project MUSE.
28 Benoît Melançon's e-journal XVIIIe siècle: bibliographie mentioned above is a more specialized example of the same thing.
29 At the time of writing there are problems with non-standard entities; non-roman scripts are given only as images.
30 "The jesting of Arlington Stringham," in The Chronicles of Clovis (1912).
Eighteenth-Century Resources (Jack Lynch, Rutgers):.
<http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/-jlynch/18th/lit.html>.
Eighteenth Century Studies (eserver): <http://eserver.org/18th>.
Electronic Text Collections in Western European Literature (ACRL): <http://www.lib.virginia.edu/wess/etexts.html>.
The European Library: <http://libraries.theeuropeanlibrary.org/>.
Jim May's Bibliographies: <www.personal.psu.edu/special/C18/maytools.htm>.
The Literary Gothic: <www.litgothic.com/Authors/authors.html>.
Littérature francophone virtuelle (ClicNet, Swarth-more University): <http://clicnet.swarthmore.edu/litterature/litterature.html>.
Livres et Littérature (Ministère de la culture, France): <http://www.culture.fr/Groups/livre_et_littera-ture/>.
Textes Français (Athena): <http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/francaut.html>.
Voice of the Shuttle (VoS): <http://vos.ucsb.edu/>.
XVIIIe siècle: bibliographie (Benoît Melançon):<http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/melancon/biblio.tdm.html>.(ISSN 1207-7461)
Arkiv for Dansk Litteratur: <http://adl.dk/>.
Augustana (University of Augsburg): <http://www.fh-augsburg.de/-harsch/augustana.html>.
Bibliopolis (Garnier): [link to Gallica <http://gallica.bnf.fr/classique/>from which you can click.].
Biblioteca Nacional Digital (Portuguese Biblioteca Nacional): <http://bnd.bn.pt/>.
Biblioteca Româneasca: <http://biblioteca.euroweb.ro/autori.htm>.
Classiques Garnier (Bibliopolis): <http://gallica.bnf.fr/classique/>.
Colecciones digitales (Spanish Biblioteca Nacional): <http://www.bne.es/esp/catalogos/coleccionesdigitales.htm>.
Dansk Nationallitterært Arkiv (DNA or Danish National Archive of Literature, Dansk Koniglige Bib-liotheket): <http://www.kb.dk/elib/lit/dan/>.
Digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse letteren (DBNL): <http://www.dbnl.nl/>.
Digitalizirana bastina (Croatian National Library): <http://www.nsk.hr/Heritage.aspx?id 25>.
Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO, Thom-son-Gale): <http://www.gale.com/EighteenthCentury/>.
Electronic Library of Historiography – Storiografia, erudizione e filosofia nell'Europa settecentesca(ELIOHS, University of Florence): <http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/collane.html>.
Electronic Texts Center (University of Virginia): <http://etext.virginia.edu/>.
Gallica classique (Bibliothèque nationale de France): <http://gallica.bnf.fr/classique/>.
Literary Landscapes (British Library): <http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/galleries/litlandscapes>.
Livre et écrit (French Ministère des affaires étran-gères): <http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/actions-france_830/livre-ecrit_1036/collection-textes_5281/>.
Manuscriptorium virtual library (Czech National Library): <http://www.manuscriptorium.com/Site/ENG/>.
Norton Topics Online (Norton Anthology of English Literature): <http://www.wwnorton.com/nael/>.
Online Library of Liberty (Liberty Fund): <http://oll.libertyfund.org/>.
Open Russian Electronic Library (OREL, Russian State Library): <http://orelrsl.ru/book/2.html>.
Polska Biblioteka Internetowa: <http://www.pbi.edu.pl/>.
Project Gutenberg: <http://www.gutenberg.org/>.
Project Laurens Janszoon Coster: <http://cf.hum.uva.nl/dsp/ljc/>.
Projekt Rastko: <http://www.rastko.org.yu/>.
Project Runeberg: <http://runeberg.org/>.
Projecto Vercial – Literatura Neoclassica: <http://alfarrabio.di.uminho.pt/vercial/programas.htm>.
Saganet (National Library and Cornell University): <http://sagnanet.is/>.
Timarit (Icelandic National Library): <http://www.timarit.is/>.
Wirtualna Biblioteka Literatury Polskiej (University of Gdansk): <http://monika.univ.gda.pl/-literat/books.htm>.
The Blake Multimedia Project: <http://cla.calpo-ly.edu/-smarx/Blake/blakeproject.html>.
Blake Web (Steven Marx, Cal Poly University): <http://cla.calpoly.edu/-smarx/Blake/blakeweb.html>.
British Poetry 1780–1910 (Virginia University):<http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo.html>.
Calendrier électronique des Spectacles sous l'Ancien régime et sous la Révolution (CÉSAR):<http://www.cesar.org.uk/cesar2/home.php>.
The Dictionary of Sensibility (Virginia University):.
<http://www.engl.virginia.edu/enec981/dictionary/>.
Early Modern Literary Studies: <http://www.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlshome.html(ISSN1201-2459)>.Eighteenth-CenturyLife:<http://ecl.dukejournals.org/>.
Eighteenth Century Studies: <http://uk.jstor.org/journals/00132586.html>;<http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk/showPage.do?DurUrl Yes&TEMPLATE /contents/abl_toc/EighteenthCenturyStudiesAmerica/issues.jsp;http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eighteenth-century_studies/>.
Johnson Society: <www.lichfieldrambler.co.uk>.
Representative Poetry Online (University of Toronto):<http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/>.
Romantic Circles: <http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/>.
Romantic Circles Praxis Series (University of Mary-land): <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/> (ISSN 1528-8129).
Romanticism on the Net: <http://www.ron.umon-treal.ca/index.shtml> (ISSN 1467-1255).
Rousseau Studies: <http://rousseaustudies.free.fr/>.
Spectator Project: <http://meta.montclair.edu/spectator>.
Le Théâtre de la Foire à Paris (Barry Russell):.
<http://www.theatrales.uqam.ca/foires/>.
Thomas Gray Archive (Alexander Huber): <http://www.thomasgray.org/texts>.
William Blake Archive: <http://www.blakearchi-ve.org/blake/>.
The World of London Theater, 1660–1800 (Patricia Craddock): <http://www.nwe.ufl.edu/-pcraddoc/lonmen1.html>.