[12437] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
[ANNOUNCE] Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Eric Lease Morgan)
Wed Sep 16 21:03:40 1998
Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 16:07:50 -0500
From: Eric Lease Morgan <eric_morgan@ncsu.edu>
To: PACS-L@LISTSERV.UH.EDU
Reply-To: eric_morgan@ncsu.edu
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
=
Try the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts at:
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/alex/
The Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts is a collection
of digital documents. The scope of documents in the
collection includes items from American literature,
English literature, and Western philosophy.
The Catalogue has a number of unique features. First,
not only can you search for and display texts from the
collection, but you can also search the content of
located texts. For example, you can search for Mark
Twain's The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. You can
then search the content of The Adventures for the words
like fish and belly to get a description of Huck Finn's
father.
Moreover, you can search the content of multiple
documents simultaneously. For example, you can first
locate all the documents in the collection authored by
Mark Twain. Next, you can search selected documents for
something like slav* to draw out themes across texts.
Another unique feature of the Catalogue is the
on-the-fly creation of PDF files. Using this option you
can specify things like fonts and font sizes for your
output. For example, you can create a PDF version of
Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle. This feature allows
you to create simply formatted but very readable
documents for printing; the documents in the collection
are not necessarily intended to be read online.
A third unique feature of the Catalogue is the free
goodies available for downloading. These goodies
include complete sets of the collected documents and
the tools necessary to search them without the use of
your Web browser. While you will still need a direct
Internet connection, the search tools provide the means
for more complex content analysis and enhance access to
texts in the collection.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Digital Library Initiatives Department, NCSU Libraries
http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/staff/morgan/
