Using Internet Resources in Literary Research

Remember always be a good consumer of internet information you must evaluate the website and the information it is providing. Cornell University Library has a great list of 5 Criteria For Evaluting Webpages.

As an example, a search in Google for arthur miller crucible results in 738,000 results.

Let's look at the results with the 5 Criteria in mind:

The summarycentral page doesn't tell us who created it (authority) or when it was last updated (currency).

The UMKC page is from the University of Missouri, Kansas City (authority) but it primarily deals with the movie made from the play and only from the perspective of the witch trials (coverage).

Librarian's Internet Index

Now let's look at a site of previously viewed and reviewed website put together by librarians. Librarian's Internet Index (http://lii.org):

Topics include current events and issues, holidays and seasons, helpful tools for information users, human interest, and more.You can also search and browse our website for the best of the Web. They have tens of thousands of entries, also maintained by librarians, and organized into 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics. They also offer featured collections. These have ranged from The Grapes of Web (a companion to the 2002 California statewide Steinbeck reading program) to such topics as taxes, elections, and September 11.

 

Directory Searching

You can search this site by the directory tree. You will see on the main page the topics and related topics mentioned in the description above. Click on Literature and Books.

Now click on the next level topic -- Literary Criticism and we get a listing of sites containing literary criticism and about literary criticism. Again, these sites have been reviewed and deemed credible. So using the directory tree I found some websites that could be useful.

Keyword Search

Another way to search Lii.org is by keyword. I searched by miller AND crucible (any site that qualifies will contain the words miller and crucible). So my results may be more targeted than by using the directory approach.

My results are indeed more directly related to Arthur Miller and the crucible.

IPL Literary Criticism Collection

Another web resource that provides viewed and reviewed websites is the IPL Literary Criticism Collection. IPL defines the Internet Public Library as:

• the first public library of and for the Internet community
• an experiment, trying to discover and promote the most effective roles and contributions of librarians to the Internet and vice versa
• a group of highly talented, creative, strong-willed people, working hard

One of the special collections that IPL has is the Literary Criticism Collection. Once in the collection homepage you can select by author's last name, title or even by literary period. Here we clicked on M-N to get to Miller, Arthur (1915-).

Once we click on Miller, Arthur (1915-) we get the entry for that author. Each entry can contain biographical articles, bibliograhies of their work and even literary criticism of the author or a particular work. Here we see that "There are no general critical sites about Arthur Miller presently in the collection". However, we also have a box on the right that suggests Sites about these individual works by Arthur Miller which contains The Crucible.

So we do have some sites about the title.