Personal Librarian: a Tool for the Literature Classroom

Abstract

A text retrieval program for IBM-compatible microcomputers, Personal Librarian (formerly known as SIRE), is reviewed for its relevance to undergraduate study of literary texts in the classroom. In addition to supporting the standard text retrieval functions, with searches for words and collocates, support of Boolean operators, and a proximity operator for collocates, retrieved documents are rank ordered according to their estimated relevance to the query. Personal Librarian also allows searches that use a whole document as a query term and an Expand command which produces a thesaurus of collocates unique to the text base being studied. In this way the program enables the user to progress from word occurrences to the level of themes and ideas. These facilities will make the software particularly useful in supporting classroom discussion of texts, where suggestiveness and a fairly intuitive set of search pathways are more important than close linguistic analysis. In introducing students of English and other literatures to the computer as a medium for the analysis of texts, there is a need for computer software that will enable rapid searching and retrieval of a text base. A range of text retrieval packages has been created, and many are now available for a microcomputer, but so far few have found a regular place in the undergraduate curriculum. For classroom use, where the focus of attention is on the content of a text rather than on its linguistic or computational dimensions, there is need for a program that is simple to understand and use, but powerful enough to enable different search strategies to be implemented and the results of searches to be viewed immediately on screen. Personal Librarian, a program available for IBM-compatible microcomputers, meets this basic need; it also provides some facilities to support text retrieval which are unique, and specially suited to work in the humanities classroom. Until recently the only program explicitly designed to meet such a need was WordCruncher. a brief account of the advantages of WordCruncher will help to set Personal Librarian in context. Almost no prior training is required to make effective use of WordCruncher at a first attempt. A student introduced to the program can choose a text (or 'book') from the 'bookshelf, shown when the program is first called up, can go from there to a screen containing an alphabetical list of all the words in the text, and by choosing a word can call up all instances of the use of the word in a window where the search word is highlighted. Given that students approach a text with some understanding, with questions they wish to ask, WordCruncher provides a highly efficient tool for focusing on the vocabulary of a text.