The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.0057  Friday, 9 January 2004

From:           Gabriel Egan <
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Date:           Thursday, 8 Jan 2004 12:19:59 -0800
Subject: 15.0035 Important Changes to the World Shakespeare
Comment:        Re: SHK 15.0035 Important Changes to the World Shakespeare
Bibliography

Martin Green wrote

 >If for economic reasons a choice has to be made between
 >printing the SQ or the Bibliography, the better decision, from the point
 >of view of students and researchers, would be to  relegate the SQ to the
 >Internet, and to continue the printing of the Bibliography. I hope that
 >others feel the same, and that the matter can be reconsidered.

It would be better to make both electronic-only, in my view. No
paper-based finding aids come close to the extraordinary power of a
computerized database. For example, with the electronic Oxford English
Dictionary one can, for the first time in history, search for an unknown
word from a known definition. Another example: with Literature Online,
one can find every example of a particular word (say, the verb 'to
place') in playtext stage directions across hundreds of years. Paper
seems likely to survive as a medium for certain kinds of writing, but
the bibliography is surely not one of them.

Gabriel Egan

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