Irish Studies at the Hesburgh Library

I’m experimenting with the Hathi Trust’s Digital Library to see how its list features might be used for teaching and research.  Apparently it is possible to make a list and then do full text searching within that collection of digital texts.  To see how it works, I’ve compiled a list of descriptions of Ireland.

When I saw the search capability, I thought the results might all appear together, but it is still a multi-step process.  When you perform a word search, you get a list of the books where that word appears, no indication of the frequency, and you then select each book in turn and hit the “find” key.  However, the resulting information is a very nice little snippet that shows the word in context.

A search for “criminal” brought up a list of books; this is the result for John Carr’s A Stranger in Ireland (1806).

I think this will be a very useful tool though it would have been nice if all the “criminal” snippets from all the books in the collection were displayed together.

Information on Hathi Trust:     Hesburgh Libraries: Hathi Trust FAQ http://eresources.library.nd.edu/databases_docs/hathitrust_FAQ.shtml

We have just added a new collection of online Oxford Bibliographies, the British and Irish Literature Collection. 

Bibliographies include the following:

1916, by Clair Wills

Censorship, by Cyndia Susan Clegg

Irish Modernism, by Lauren Arrington

Literature of the Bardic Revival, by Mary-Ann Constantine

Post-war Irish Drama, by Eva Urban

Laurence Sterne, by Paul Goring

Yeats, W. B., by Lauren Arrington.

Bibliographies advertised as Forthcoming (Spring 2013, so I expect to see them soon):

Chorographical and Landscape Writing, by Bridget M. Keegan

Eco-criticisim, by Richard Pickard

James Joyce, by Anne Fogarty

Northern Irish Drama, by Eva Urban

Seamus Heaney, by Bernard O’Donoghue