More Library card magic!

Here's another great e-resource you can access using your North Western Library card; the Literary Reference Centre.

Go to the library catalogue website ( http://nwls.spydus.com). Click on “Databases” in the top menu bar, and you will see a drop-down menu. Click on “NSW NET.” The first time you go into NSW.net from your computer, you may see a screen that says “Please select your library”. Click on the arrow next to this and from the drop down menu, select “North Western”. Click on “Go”. This gives you a list of e-resources you can access from home, beginning with ANZ Reference Centre. Click on the At Home “Connect” button and you will see a log in page. Type in your library card number and click “Login”.

Click on “Literary Reference Centre”. This is a great resource for anyone who loves English literature, or for students in Year 11 and 12. It combines information from over 1000 books, major literary encyclopedias and journals, and reference works. Literary Reference Centre (LRC) contains detailed information on the most studied authors and their works. You can type in the name of an author or book, or browse lists of authors or works.

For example, to search for Tim Winton, type in “Winton, Tim”. This will bring up a page of biography, and links to an interview with Tim Winton, plot summaries, some literary criticism, and reviews of his works.

Another feature of LRC is that it gives access to the full text of a lot of classic books. On the home page of LRC, click on “Browse works”. You should see a screen with the word “Select” beside a box, at the top of the page. Click the drop down arrow beside the box. Choose “Full-text classics” by highlighting it, and clicking “Go”.

This brings up a massive list of books that you can download and read. These have mostly been made available by Project Gutenberg, and are older classics (out of copyright or “public domain” works) which have been typed up by volunteers. You could also access these works from the Project Gutenberg home page http://www.gutenberg.org. If you haven’t come across Project Gutenberg before, you will be amazed at what is available.

In addition to providing links to the Gutenberg e-books, the Literary Reference Centre (LRC) provides links to literary criticism, plot summaries and biographies of the authors for each of these books. Using LRC, I downloaded a copy of “Cranford” by Elizabeth Gaskell. I could save it as either a web page (.html) or a plain text file (.txt).

I was also able to read about Elizabeth Gaskell’s life, and there were 11 articles which discussed the language, imagery, themes and ideas in “Cranford”. I learned that Elizabeth Gaskell began writing “Cranford” in 1851 when Charles Dickens invited her to send tales for his new weekly journal, “Household Words”. Dickens and Gaskell were so pleased with the first two “Cranford” stories, which depicted a community of genteel single women in a retired country village, that Gaskell went on to write fourteen more!

We hope you enjoy exploring the Literary Reference Centre.