Wordsmith

New Library World

ISSN: 0307-4803

Article publication date: 1 June 1998

60

Keywords

Citation

Ashworth, W. (1998), "Wordsmith", New Library World, Vol. 99 No. 3, pp. 132-132. https://doi.org/10.1108/nlw.1998.99.3.132.1

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited


The content of this disc is an unexpected mixture combining profiles of contemporary authors from the Irish Republic, Denmark and Portugal. It has been produced in the European Union assisted project MUMLIB (Multimedia Methodology in Libraries) and the edition was closed in spring 1996. It was made to be sold primarily to libraries and educational institutions, which are allowed to set up a list of the titles available in their local collections.

Wordsmith comprises a total of 46 authors of poems, novels and plays. For each of these 46, there are biographical, bibliographical and literary descriptive notes, and users of the disc are able to hear the authors reading selected extracts from their works, or discussing their literary motivations. There are photographs, video and sound‐recordings to complete the mini‐profiles of authors and their works. The literary content is multilingual with English translations of a few of the works thought to be most important. The disc is indexed by titles, and by categories such as novels, poetry, drama and children’s books. There is, unfortunately, no searching tool for locating quotations from the works.

Although the persons and materials selected for each country present an interesting picture of contemporary writing within it, there is no attempt to present it comparatively, neither is there any readily‐detectable reason for the selection of individual excerpts. In almost all cases the authors read their own work. The combination of descriptive matter and quotations produces a fair picture of each author’s work and, in total, of the current writing of the three countries.

The Titles Available Database can be modified by a simple editing program on the disc to show which titles are available in any local library. This disc, although odd in its mixed content, embodies an interesting idea that, if followed up elsewhere, could help a library to build up collections of useful compact guides to contemporary literature.

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