In Review

Abstract

Five years ago, according to the Internet Domain Survey, there were two million host addresses on the World Wide Web. Today there are more than forty-three million hosts, and each of these hosts can contain hundreds of individual sites. The cheapness and immediacy of Web publication has begun to attract the editors of scholarly journals; partially in response to the unending cuts in library subscription budgets, over 3500 journals now publish electronically. This trend has been supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, which has recently made available twenty million dollars to license electronic delivery of scholarly journals to university libraries (Berkowitz 19). The pull of Internet publication, which has already led numerous theatre professionals to devise their own Web homepages, has, understandably, begun to lure Canadian theatre editors. The unadvertised electronic edition of Theatre Research in Canada has attracted 1000 hits since it became available worldwide on the Atlantic Canada Theatre Site (acts) last year – a hit figure larger than its annual subscription run. Ball and Plant’s Bibliography of Theatre History in Canada has directly reached only those scholars and libraries fortunate enough to procure a printed copy; since ecw Press and the editors recently and most generously allowed acts to convert this fundamental research tool to an electronically searchable database and publish it (along with the editors’ annual updates), it has become freely and instantly available to researchers worldwide.