Collection Of Papers Research Articles

Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (review)

Reviewed by: Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana Jarrod Hayes Shapiro, Norman R. , translator. Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana. U of Illinois P, 2004. Pp. 280. ISBN 0-2520-7149-2. Creole Echoes makes an important contribution to both American studies and French and Francophone studies by highlighting a significant body of American literature written not in English, but in French. In so doing, this collection draws attention to French as not only a European language, but an American one as well. Containing a total of 108 poems by 33 poets presented in alphabetical order, Creole Echoes makes available for an English-speaking audience, for the first time in most cases, a bilingual collection of poems in the French original with translations by Norman R. Shapiro. In an important departure from most other collections, poems by French immigrants to Louisiana, white Creoles, and Creoles of color are included in Creole Echoes side by side, which gives full meaning to the term Creole as a non-racially specific term for anyone born of the New World as opposed to the Old. M. Lynn Weiss frames this grouping with a general introduction and individualized prefatory notes for each poet. Her introduction alone would make the collection worth reading, for it is one of the most succinct presentations of Louisiana literature in French that I have read. Indeed, as a specialist of American studies, Weiss has single-handedly done more to challenge her field through French literary studies of Louisiana than any other scholar. Weiss situates this literature in relation to Louisiana history and the literary movements and trends of France during the same period. Although making a convincing case as to why the literature of Creole writers of color should be integrated into the history of African American literature, she also highlights ways in which they rewrote the conventions of French romanticism to translate its Republican inspiration into an American context, where its revolutionary politics could be used to challenge slavery and racism. Furthermore, Creole Echoes assembles work even the specialist might find only with difficulty. The French versions themselves of its poems are available in somewhat easy-to-find collections in the case of only less than half of those included here. And the vast majority of these are at the Bibliothèque Tintamarre website maintained by Centenary College, which has undertaken a massive retrieval of French literature from Louisiana (for the other most recent collections see Allain and Ancelet; St. Martin and Voorhies; and Cowan). For many other poems, scholars would have to undertake the painstaking task of sifting through the archives (newspaper collections in many cases). With the exception of the inclusion here and there of Creole works in anthologies of Southern, Louisiana, or African American literature, English translations of nineteenth-century Louisiana poetry are even rarer. The most notable of these exceptions is the 1979 translation of a 1845 collection of poems by Creole writers of color undertaken by Régine [End Page 672] Latortue and Gleason R.W. Adams with the title of Les Cenelles: A Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century. Even in comparison with the English translations of poems in Les Cenelles, Shapiro's translations in Creole Echoes are more accurate and more poetic, and this, in spite of the constraints of rhyme and meter that he chose to impose on himself (unlike the translators of Les Cenelles). Compare, for example, the translation of Armand Lanusse's poem entitled "Epigramme" ["Epigram"] included in both Les Cenelles and Creole Echoes. This poem relates the annual confessions of a "bigote" [translated as "zealot" in Les Cenelles and "zealous pietist" in Creole Echoes], whom the pastor exhorts to abandon her sinful ways. She has one final request before doing so: "[A]vant que la grâce en mon âme scintille, / Pour m'ôter tout motif de pécher désormais, / Que ne puis-je, pasteur – Quoi donc? – placer ma fille?" (Creole Echoes 94). Les Cenelles translates these verses as follows: "[B]efore grace sparkles in my soul, / To remove henceforth all incentive to sin, / Why can't I, father – what? – establish my daughter?" (95). Shapiro, however...

Localized Debates of Agricultural Biotechnology in Community Newspapers: A Quantitative Content Analysis of Media Frames and Sources

This research is a quantitative content analysis of agricultural biotechnology coverage appearing in a collection of community newspapers in Northern California and Missouri between 1992 and 2004. It examines the similarities and differences in news media frames used to focus the debate at the local level, and evaluates the frequency and range of dominant political and social actors as news sources. Newspaper coverage in some community newspapers frames the story in more complex and diverse ways and includes a wider range of voices than has been reported in studies of coverage in the national, elite press. Oppositional viewpoints exist in some local newspapers, perhaps more so than in national news.

Convergence in the Library’s News Room: Enhancing News Collections and Services in Academic Libraries

The use and importance of newspaper collections in academic libraries have been in decline as acquisition costs have increased significantly as the difficulty obtaining daily issues in a timely manner has grown, and as newspaper readership has declined nationally. In contrast, today’s student and researcher are using television and Internet news sources heavily. This article explores the role of the academic library’s news collections in complementing the university’s Newspaper Readership Program and supporting faculty efforts to develop their students’ critical thinking and media literacy skills. The authors suggest that digital news forms, including television, should be considered and included as part of the library’s collections. In this light, lessons can be learned from convergence taking place in the news industry. Libraries must also “converge” news sources to provide library users with news sources, which reflect today’s news environment and also reflect the “information cycle.” The newly created News Room at Pattee Library incorporates a three-television news viewing area; a broader selection of newspaper titles (particularly international titles); and a news magazine collection, as well as providing access to a wide variety of news aggregator database, and the library’s significant historical microfilm collection. A temporary television installation and focus groups were used to help inform the development of the News Room and to determine interest and resistance to sound and televisions in the library. The Libraries’ Serials Department provided analysis of newspaper delivery options (and reliability) and related subscription costs, as well as suggestions for reducing the number of missing/nonreceipt issues. In addition, greater focus was placed on niche reference service supporting news sources and news-related research. Use of the News and Microforms Library has increased.

Newspaper collection utilization patterns in a Nigerian Academic Library

Newspaper collection utilization patterns in a Nigerian Academic Library

Connecting to the past: Newspaper digitization in the Nordic countries

Digital newspaper projects are a hot topic around the world. One pioneer in the field of digitizing newspapers is the Nordic TIDEN project, launched in 2001. Today the amount of online pages has risen from 400,000 at launch to 1.6 million. In Finland and Sweden, full text search is available. The Historical Newspaper Library in Finland is highly regarded among researchers and the public. It is easy to use in its Google-like approach. The users are connected to places, questions, nations and human life over centuries. The process of digitizing newspapers includes microfilming, digitization and optical character recognition, identification and database import. The speed and automation of the production environment is essential. The automated processes of today offer the coordinates to each word in the paper and the users get better service as the words are highlighted. Images are of a better quality as grayscale images can be handled automatically. In digital futures, the digital collection management will be an exciting challenge. The infrastructure is changing fast as well as the expectations. We have to improve access in various ways, including automatic translation to old holdings and meeting places for users: connecting them to each other and to holdings in other heritage sectors. Newspaper collections are targets that have a great demand on the internet from researchers as well as the public at large. Our digitized historical newspaper collections and the born digital ones are connecting the users to places, questions, nations and human life over centuries. Incidents from the past are suddenly easily accessible. The past is living in the present.

Thematic research collections and women's studies

This article reflects on the many challenges (financial, practical, and epistemological) facing the producers of digital thematic collections while proposing ways in which to navigate these same challenges. Drawing on current trends in academic librarianship and archive management, as well as the author's experiences gained while managing a digital collection of early twentieth-century newspapers ( The Modernist Journals Project), the article defines and discusses thematic collections of primary texts; metadata; preservation and access; collaboration; project sustainability; and implications for women's studies. In so doing, the article addresses the ways in which Feminisms and Print Culture 1830s–1930s, a proposed collaborative multi-media project dedicated to international women's history, feminisms, and print media in the 19th and early 20th centuries, can be the inheritor of the best standards and practices offered by previous projects while avoiding some of their challenges.

Manuscripts and Broadsheets. Narrative Genres and the Communication Circuit among Working-Class Youth in early 20th-Century Finland

This article explores the hazy boundary between folklore and literature, orality and literacy in relation to the individual and the community. How do people who belong to the first generation of active writers in their family and community express their own expe- riences through fictional narratives and the literary tradition? This question is explored in relation to the working-class youth in the small industrial community of Karkkila (Hogfors) in southern Finland. The most important research materials are the editions of hand-writ- ten newspapers written by these young people from 1914 to 1925. My theoretical background is derived from both folklore studies and book history. Inspired by the research of Robert Darnton, I have outlined the communication circuit of the work- ing-class youth during the early 20th century, discussing the position of the manuscript tradition (hand-written newspapers, manuscript songbooks, minutes) in relation to the printed texts (books, newspapers, broadsheets) and the oral tradition. In my article I focus on the narratives of love in the manuscripts written by the working-class youth. How do they work with the ideas and narrative genres and themes adopted from the printed media and the oral tradition? I outline fictionalization of personal experiences and localization of fictional, printed texts as two basic narrative strategies utilized in these processes. Narrative as a theoretical concept and as a methodological tool has been inten- sively discussed both by folklorists and literary historians. This article explores the hazy boundary between folklore and literature, orality and literacy, in rela- tion to the individual and the community. How do people who belong to the first generation of active writers in their family and community express their own experiences through fictional narratives and the literary tradition? My conclusions are based on a case study of the literary activities of young work- ing-class people in Karkkila (Hogfors) 1 , a small industrial community in south- ern Finland, in the 1910s and 1920s. During this period, the young men and women of this community produced a large collection of hand-written newspapers named Valistaja (The Enlightener). The paper was confiscated by the police in 1926 be- cause of the communist political orientation of its writers. It provided a medium for discussing political questions and practising literary genres. At the beginning of the 1980s, a pile of issues of The Enlightener was found in the attic of the local

Preface

The achievement of sustainable development entails the integration of scientific approaches and environmental management, legislation, and policy making realities. Aquatic ecosystem management is a key element in this endeavour for sustainability, since water quality is an important prerequisite for human health and development. The health and integrity of aquatic ecosystems should therefore not only be regarded as important in its own right, but also be seen as an indicator, or barometer, of success in achieving sustainability.Addressing this issue of integration within environmental assessment as well as between scientific assessment and policy making strongly depends on spatial scale. Indeed, it seems likely that the accuracy of our comprehension of processes decreases with increasing spatial scale. Therefore, the “scale issue” raises, among others, two types of questions regarding (i) the appropriateness of methods to the stakes, and (ii) the relevance of either the quality criteria or the remediation objectives.Iterations between these scales followed by integration are necessary, and they need to be achieved consistently in order to produce relevant managerial approaches and to promote efficient remediation and preservation of aquatic ecosystems. This led the Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management Society (AEHMS) to sponsor a conference in the fall of 2003 entitled ‘Scaling from local to global perspectives,’ with support from Cemagref, a French public research institute involved in environmental research. The French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development, the Rhone-Mediterranee-Corse Water Agency, the Rhone-Alpes Regional Council and the Rhone department also sponsored the conference. The Lyon meeting was the seventh in a series of biennial conferences convened by the AEHMS across the world. Past conferences were held in Canada, United States, Germany, Portugal, Mexico, and The Netherlands.About 30 oral presentations were given during the conference including the Vallentyne plenary lecture and keynotes in the following sessions: physical, chemical and biological determinants of ecological functioningadvanced (bioassay) techniques and their managerial applicationsscientific inputs to environmental policies and managementIn addition to the oral presentations more than 40 posters were displayed at the conference. Soon after the meeting an electronic proceedings was posted on the Society's web site. A compendium of papers from the conference are included in this special issue encompassing a wide range of topics such as ecotoxicology, ecosystem functioning/integrity, biodiversity, non-indigenous species and applied approaches on waste management. We hope these papers will help students, scientists and managers in tackling the complex issue of “scale” which will continue to confront investigators in the future. We take this opportunity to sincerely thank all partners, sponsors, and members of scientific and Local Arrangements committees for their support and efforts.

Digitisation of Newspapers at the British Library

ABSTRACT The newspaper collections of the British Library are among the world's finest. The repository at Colindale, North London, UK, holds some 20 miles of UK, Colonial, and overseas newspapers published since 1800. The author charts the work of the British Library over the last dozen years, in using the technology of the time to explore how digitisation can provide greater access to portions of the British Library's newspaper collections. Software and hardware developments have quickened since 2000, and projects have been completed on a small scale to prove the concept of Internet access to texts using software which can enhance readibility of texts, and also can search all of the texts, with results immediately available to users. In currently undertaking a large project to scan up to 2 million pages of nineteenth century newspapers, the Library is moving to a larger level of scale in its programme to provide wider access to its newspaper collections.

Newspapers at the National Library of Norway

PurposeAims to describe the development of the Newspaper Collection at the National Library of Norway.Design/methodology/approachDescribes the historical and organizational development of the collection, analysis of registration systems and the role of newspapers in historical research.FindingsProvides possible solutions for organization and cataloguing.Originality/valueProvides a first description of the use of MAVIS (Merged Audio Visual Information System) as a cataloguing solution for a newspaper collection.

Emerging Issues in Lake Superior Research

The Aquatic Ecosystem Health and Management Society (AEHMS) sponsored the “Superior: State of the Lake” conference in Houghton, Michigan, which was hosted by the Michigan Technological University in May 2002. This was part of a continuing series of “State of the Lake” conferences organized by AEHMS following those on Lakes Huron, Erie, Ontario, Michigan, Baikal, Victoria and Winnipeg. These conferences have been designed to integrate, synthesize, and publish “state of the lake” information about various Great Lakes of the World in peer reviewed book series (Ecovision World Monograph Series) or as special issues in the journal Aquatic Ecosystem Health & Management, published by AEHMS. The Society has an excellent track record of publishing special issues on the Great lakes of the world: Large Lakes of the World: Comparative Ecology(AEHM, 2000a); Ecosystem Health of Lake Baikal, Russia(AEHM, 2000b); Great Lakes of the World: Food web, Fisheries and management (AEHM, 2002); Comparing Great Lakes of the World(AEHM, 2003). The AEHMS has also published several monographs: The Lake Huron Ecosystem: Ecology, Fisheries and Management(Munawar et al., 1995); State of Lake Erie: Past, Present and Future(Munawar et al., 1999); Phytoplankton Dynamics in the North American Great Lakes, volume 1(Munawar and Munawar, 1996); volume 2(Munawar and Munawar, 2000); Great Lakes of the World-GLOW: Food-web, Health & Integrity (Munwar and Hecky, 2001); State of Lake Ontario (SOLO): Past, Present and Future(Munawar, 2003).Very little has been published about this lake since “Limnology of Lake Superior” was published in the Journal of Great Lakes Research (Munawar, 1978). It was based on the Upper Great Lakes symposium convened at the Great Lakes Research Conference in Guelph, Ontario, 1976. The “State of the lake” conference on Lake Superior convened almost 25 years after the Guelph meeting. This conference provided an excellent opportunity for various Great Lakes researchers to present new data on diverse topics, and to interact with peers on various aspects of large lakes research. The conference was convened to provide a forum to discuss ecosystem health in scientific and management circles, increased development of eco-technologies, sensitivity of large oligotrophic ecosystems such as Lake Superior to environmental stress, and the challenging complexity of integrating topics such as ecosystem integrity, biodiversity, restoration and sustainable development. The conference's theme reflected an integration of a large range of topics and concepts to bring together a state-of-the-art status of Lake Superior, which will be published by the AEHMS in a peer reviewed Ecovision monograph currently under preparation.This special issue has been designed to focus on “Emerging issues in Lake Superior research,” one of the main topics from the conference. Lake Superior provides unique opportunities for research because of its size, ultraoligotrophic status (similar to some ultraoligotrophic oceanic regions) and its relatively low density of human population centers and industrial activities. It is the largest lake in the world by surface area and the second largest by volume. Understanding of its paleo-history depends on a detailed determination of relict shorelines; in this issue Baedke et al. present results of their current efforts to reconstruct the paleo-lake levels of the Upper Great Lakes. Investigators interested in the biogeochemistry of ultraoligotrophic freshwater ecosystems have focused their attention on this lake. In this special issue several reports identify emerging issues in contemporary limnology that are well examined in Lake Superior.Increasing interest in the role of dissolved organic matter is evident in several of the papers of this issue. Cotner et al. discuss the biogeochemistry of organic carbon, noting that the DOC pool is 10 times as large as the particulate organic carbon pool and that improved understanding of DOC origin and fate is critical for understanding C-flux in this lake. Heath and Munawar discuss the significance of phosphate uptake by bacteria and note increasing evidence that the apportionment of available P between bacterioplankton and phytoplankton appears to depend on the availability of “labile” DOC to support bacterial activities. McKay et al. present interesting thoughts regarding the possibility that Lake Superior phytoplankton may be limited by iron availability; in turn, iron availability may be mediated by DOC complexation. Perlinger et al. report emerging technologies to detect and determine the physico-chemical and biochemical properties, food web fluxes and bioaccumulation pathways of “legacy” chemicals and novel synthetic organic toxicants that are introduced to lake Superior primarily through atmospheric deposition. Edsall et al. report the use of Hexagenia burrowing mayflies in a benthic survey as a sensitive indicator of ecosystem health status in two embayments of Lake Superior. We hope that this compendium of papers will be useful in highlighting some of the research being carried out and in enhancing our current understanding of one of the largest and most pristine lakes of the world.

Developing Methods for Very-Large-Scale Searches in Proquest Historical Newspapers Collection and Infotrac the Times Digital Archive: The Case of Two Million Versus Two Millions

Historical corpora designed for linguistic research are often too small to provide statistically robust information about infrequent items. Alternative sources exist in the form of historical collections available online, but these databases may present methodological problems. Some of these problems can be circumvented, and useful results can be gleaned, including a proxy for incidence. In studies on the integration of the word million into the English system of number words, based on billions of words from historical newspapers, it was possible to determine that parity was reached between obsolescent ( two millions) and Present-Day ( two million) forms in American papers around 1880 and in The Times around 1920. The explosive growth in the use of million proved to start with WWII in the U.S. and in the 1950s in the U.K. This information could not be teased from a 20-million-word ‘megacorpus’ of commonly used diachronic and synthetic corpora designed by linguists.

Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens' World , and: Mark Twain and Medicine: "Any Mummery Will Cure" (review)

Reviewed by: Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens' World, and: Mark Twain and Medicine: "Any Mummery Will Cure" Lucy Rollin (bio) Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens' World. By Terrell Dempsey. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P, 2003Mark Twain and his Circle Series, Tom Quirk, Editor Mark Twain and Medicine: "Any Mummery Will Cure". By K. Patrick Ober. Columbia and London: U of Missouri P2003. Mark Twain and his Circle Series, Tom Quirk, Editor When professionals outside our field of literary studies make major contributions to it, we need to sit up and take notice. These two books are fine examples of what an approach from a different discipline can accomplish, each a perfect match of subject and scholar. Terrell Dempsey, an attorney in Hannibal, Missouri, calls himself "an accidental historian." He certainly need not be deprecating about it. He has produced a thorough, passionate, highly readable work that must change the perspective of every Twain scholar and fan. His research began with his own child. As Hannibal's Tom-and-Becky look-alike contest gained its annual fever, his daugliter's discomfort touched him. She is not white. She could not possibly be considered for the honor of being "Becky" for the coming year. Dempsey, too, became uneasy. He began to look around and make connections. He re-read Adventures of [End Page 136] Huckleberry Finn. He read Fishkin's Lighting Out for the Territory and an antique book, which he found by accident, called A Bible Defence of Slavery. He went to the Hannibal Free Library where, at last, in the Missouri Room, he found the mother lode: a microfilm collection of Hannibal newspapers going back to the 1840s, including those for which Sam Clemens worked as a printer's apprentice. There, in black and white, were advertisements for buying and selling slaves, stories of runaways and their punishment, countless racist jokes and anecdotes, reprints of speeches denouncing abolitionists, sermons defending slavery. This was the atmosphere in which Sam Clemens lived from 1839 to 1853, from age four to age eighteen—the most formative years of his life. Using his legal expertise to review the laws of the State of Missouri during the 1800s as well as census and statistical documents, and reprinting much of the newspaper material, Dempsey reproduces that atmosphere as closely as possible in a scholarly book. He traces the slaves in Clemens' own family, the growth of the abolition movement, the support of slavery from the various pulpits in Hannibal, the escalating tensions between Missouri and Illinois as slaves began escaping across the river, the buying and selling of slaves in Hannibal itself (he notes that a great deal of trading and lending were done without record), and the coming of the railroad—which soon cut Hannibal off from the steamboat-driven prosperity it had briefly enjoyed. He recounts major trials and crimes, as well as "minor" incidents such as a white woman flinging a pot of hot preserves into her slave's face for some impudence, then beating the woman while she screamed. The casual inhumanity with which slaves were treated in everyday life streams past the reader, detail after detail, like the muddy Mississippi. That Twain eventually repudiated slavery, made financial reparations in the form of tuition for black college students, and most important, created the character of Jim, is all the more remarkable considering the atmosphere of Hannibal in the mid-1800s and Twain's immersion in it. One element in Dempsey's history may be of particular interest: the abundance of "darky" jokes and anecdotes in dialect which filled the newspapers of the day. Twain would most certainly have typeset a great many such stories, containing sentences like this: "It's because I wants de lucerdations ob your obserbations and 'sperience on a subjec dat's lost in the mazes ob doubt and deplexity to me" (290). Twain has become famous for his mastery of this and other dialects; Dempsey's book suggests that such mastery came early, thanks to his skill as a typesetter within the context of the slave-holding culture of Hannibal. K. Patrick Ober is a physician and teacher in the medical...

News that's fit to print—and preserve: How long can libraries hold on to their newspaper collections?

Science NewsVolume 165, Issue 2 p. 24-24 Feature News that's fit to print—and preserve: How long can libraries hold on to their newspaper collections? Alexandra Goho, Search for more papers by this author Alexandra Goho, Search for more papers by this author First published: 02 July 2009 https://doi.org/10.2307/4014950Citations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume165, Issue210 January 2004Pages 24-24 RelatedInformation

Care coordination and health sector reform

THE PRODUCTIVITY COMMISSION (Productivity Commission 2004) has nominated nationally coordinated health sector reform as one of two top priorities (along with natural resource management) for extending the industry reform agenda under the aegis of National Competition Policy. This is in recognition of the importance of these areas for the wellbeing of Australians, and the level of resources they will require in future years. The Commission states that ?an independent review of Australia?s health system as a whole is a critical first step in achieving cooperative solutions to deep-seated structural problems? (p. XI). The fragmentation in health system governance that results from the national? state split is mirrored in the lack of coordinated care at many levels throughout the system. The Commission?s proposal has been welcomed by many in the health industry, no doubt with some nervousness, because of the broad and deep conviction that something has to change in the apparently intractable problem of split funding responsibilities. ?Today?s health-care delivery systems are not organized in ways that promote best quality. Service delivery is largely uncoordinated, requiring steps and patient ?hand-offs? that slow down care and decrease rather than improve patient safety? (OECD 2004). Improving care coordination is high on the list of issues to be addressed in any reform of the health sector. This issue of the journal features a collection of papers which address the sometimes jagged ?seams? in the current system. They offer insights into some of the consequences of the structural problems the Productivity Commission would like to see addressed, and document an energetic search for methods of enhancing the effectiveness of health care.

A TRIBUTE TO FRANCISCO VARELA

he present volume of Biological Research is dedicated to the memory of Francisco Varela,renown Chilean scholar recently deceased in Paris (1). The issue contains a collection ofpapers by people who shared moments of thought and research with Francisco at differenttimes and places during his short but remarkably productive life. The variety of issues addressedby the articles contained here aims to be no more than an unpretentious modest reflection of thewide spectrum of Francisco´s intellectual interests, from Mathematics to Neuroscience, fromEpistemology to Psychology. In all of the fields that Francisco explored with his well preparedand open mind he contributed with deep novel insights, that crystallized in numerous articles,comments, books and interviews. We hope that this volume, which we have entitled “A Tributeto Francisco Varela (1946-2001)” will be informative and inspiring for colleagues and studentsall over the world.1) LETELIER JC (2001) Los derroteros cientificos de Francisco Varela (1946-2001). Biol. Res. 34:vii-xiiiJUAN BACIGALUPO AND ADRIAN PALACIOS,Santiago, March 2003.

Digitised newspapers at Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library

This paper reports a local newspaper digitisation project carried out by the Norfolk Library and Information Service. The project is unique because it is to date the only UK public library project to digitise and index a significant proportion of a newspaper collection. The paper opens with a review of some of the issues in newspaper access and preservation. It then describes how the Norfolk Library and Information Service project was carried out, and offers an assessment of how successfully the project addresses access and preservation issues. The paper concludes that the project should be seen as a success, although the costs involved, and the general unresolved issue of digital preservation means that it is not a practical option for most libraries. Greater information sharing from completed projects is needed, as this will provide a key to future success in other projects.

An archive of Yorùbá religious ephemera

An archive of ephemera seems almost a contradiction in terms. If archives come into being because governments and individuals preserve papers they consider to be worth keeping, then an archive should be a crystallisation of past and present values concerning texts. Most of Nigeria's archives are in fact that kind of crystallisation, whether they are local government records, newspaper collections, Arabic-language chronicles, or little-known collections of personal letters and diaries, preserved because the individuals concerned, and subsequently their heirs, had a sense of their value.

Determining the market for contributed property, such as a newspaper collection

Determining the market for contributed property, such as a newspaper collection

A Labour of Love. Critical Reflections on the Writings of Marie-Catherine Desjardins (Mme de Villedieu) by Roxane Decker Lalande (review)

MLR, 96.3, 200 I 82 I thehexagone, which isa pity for a bookthat presents itself primarily asa survey. The style, particularly inthechapters dealing with thecomposition regressive oftragedy, is attimes dogmatic andrepetitive, andthe lackofanindex orbibliography (again, to beexpected) canattimes bevery frustrating, butonthe whole this isaninteresting book which tackles some long-running issues inRacinestudies. UNIVERSITY OFEDINBURGH * VERONIQUE DESNAIN ALabour of Love. Crztical Refections onthe Wrztings of Marze-Catherzne Desfardins (Mme de Villedieu). Ed. by ROXANE DECKER LALANDE. Cranbury, NJ:Fairleigh Dickinson University Press;London:Associated University Press. 2000. 222pp £3° Thisisa collection ofessays, only twoofwhich havebeenpreviously published. In herintroduction, RoxaneDecker Lalandeprovides a useful synopsis ofeach,and then setsMmede Villedieu's lifeandwork ina perspective ofgender, identity, imageand empowerment. The first papersdealwith herdramatic output, the rarely-quoted Manlius, J%iteis andLeFavori. Perry Gethner illustrates howMmede Villedieu managed towrite politically safe plays about royal conspiracies bymaking clear her own belief inabsolutism. ChloeHoggtraces the parallels between LeFavori andthe career ofthe recently-disgraced Foucquet, andshows howanuncomfortable reality istransformed into a comedy with a happy ending, something infinitely more palatable for LouisXIV. Henriette Goldwyn, ontheother hand, seesthese same plays as potentially subversive, with strong, independent heroines situated outside thetradition ofpatriarchal authority. Thesecond section dealswith theauthor's short stories andletters. For Nancy Klein, the heroines ofthese stories areinnovative andfeminist, flouting convention anddemanding freedom ofexpression, while ElizabethGoldsmith showshow Mme de Villedieu's love-letters, seemingly published against herwill, reveal thetensions inherent inbeing both a writer anda woman, a self-publicist anda private person. Thefinal partofthis volume deals with the author's novels andtheir reception. Twoessays aredevoted tothe Memoires dela vie deHenr7ette-Sylvie deMoliere. Margaret Wiseargues thatthefemale crossdressing must besetinthecontemporary socio-economic context, oneofexchange andpossession ofvarious sorts, whereas DonnaKuizenga focuses onquestions of identity, arguing that MmedeVilledieu sought toresist thesexual stereotyping to which women writers fell victim. Lalande,unsurprisingly after herintroduction, presents LesDesordres del'Amour as a parable ofauthorial empowerment. Thefinal essay, byFaith Beasley, analyses MmedeVilledieu's complex relationship with her readership, crucial for anauthor whoearned her living byher pen.Inthis collection ofpapers taken as a whole, onemight regret a slight lackofeditorial control: for example, diXerent contributors give usthe same basicinformation about the author andherworks. In addition, thefact that most ofthetexts arelittle-known means that a necessary degree ofnarrative andquotation sometimes seems tocrowd out analysis andperspective. On thewhole, however, foranyone interested in the evolution ofthe novel, these essays will provide food for thought. JOHN CAMPBELL UNIVERSITY OFGLASGOW ...