At 10:37 01.09.98 EDT, Michael Papio wrote:
>
>To all:
>
>I am writing to announce the launching of the online version of
>Lectura Dantis, A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation.
>No doubt the majority of you are familiar with the journal and so
>I'll omit further descriptions...
>
>the (case-sensitive) URL:
>http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/LD
>
>The site is, naturally, in a constant state of improvement; among
>the initiatives which will enhance its usefulness to scholars is
>the compilation of article abstracts. Authors are warmly
>encouraged to submit overviews of their articles which have appeared
>in the journal over the eleven years of its existence. To make
>this easier, a submission form is available at the site. While
>author abstracts are most desired, however, any close reader can
>make a submission.
My first reaction to this announcement was to think that it was a good idea
of his superiors to enslave and fund somebody for this kind of work,
because it would in fact be a valuable service to put the LD tables of
contents, eventually even with abstracts of contents, on the web. In the
meantime I have found out, to my bewilderment, that Michael is doing this
work on his own initiative, "pro bono" and out of pure generosity, and that
his on-line version is not confined to the TOC's, but, in the case of the
first four issues (now out of print: Fall 1987 - Spring 1989), includes
also the FULL TEXT of all the articles and of the editor's 'endpapers' (the
book reviews are not yet included). Selected articles from further issues
are announced to follow. In addition, there is a usefull 'List of
Contributors', listing for all 21 issues (Fall 1987 - Fall-Spring 1997) the
names of authors with their contributions and precise references to number
of volume and page.
Everything is done in an unpretentious but neat and nice HTML design (no
abundance of unnecessary pictures, no frames, no Java). The texts and _List
of Contributors_ can be browsed as well as searched with an own search
engine. As a last touch of perfection one might desire to have page numbers
in the TOC's, and page separators together with page numbers in the texts
in accordance with the original print, to facilitate quotations referencing
the precise page. But these minor improvements can be expected to be added
later, since the whole project is conceived as "a perpetual work-in-progress".
While I still think that there should be a law against doctorands devoting
their time to such projects before having finished their diss, I
nevertheless greatly appreciate Michael's initiative and hope that the
academic world will reward him with due honours and esteem for having
created one of the major scholarly Dante sites of the internet!
Otfried
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