Print

Print


Dear Sally-Beth and List recipients,

To add to Professor Davidson's comment, I love the idea of having the records on CD
ROM, with a search engine and perhaps links to relevant www sites and print sources.
The issues of archivability and reproduction of CDs bear further discussion.

On the downside, I have been looking at a few new CD ROMs on Shakespeare and
literary subjects. They're not generally very good. Problems vary from difficulty to
reproduce page layouts onto a screen and still be readable to search engines being
"iffy." That doesn't mean they couldn't be good, especially when the texts contain
historical "data," therefore easier to represent on screen than something like
Shakespeare's First Folio in facsimile. (I still return to my First Folio facsimile
rather than using a CD ROM I recently got because of the problem of on-screen
quality and convenience.)

I do support Professor Davidson's idea of inexpensive paper versions of the REED
volumes. As a younger scholar, I tried to purchase several volumes with a grant a
while ago, but they were all out of print. Using them in libraries as reference only
and copying chunks of pages has hindered work and made me give money to photocopying
services instead of book presses.

As a suggestion (for personal use rather than library purchase) books in
engineering, management and such disciplines are sometimes marketed as hole-punched
pages to put in a ring binder, thus removing the cost of binding. Several times I've
wanted to take a twenty-year section or so of records with me on a day at the
library without carrying the whole volume. With separate pages that's possible.

Lloyd Kermode
Cal. State, Long Beach