The UTEL Project

We are developing a Web-based University of Toronto English library (named UTEL) under a development grant from the Provost's office. UTEL aims to integrate electronic materials into both teaching and research activities of English faculty and students. Our basic materials come from the CD-ROM published by the Modern Language Association of America with Using TACT with Electronic Texts (New York, 1996): over 3,000 texts from Beowulf to World-War-I poetry. Many of these texts are donated by Dr. Jeffery Triggs, director of the North America Reading Program for the Oxford English Dictionary. Many come from new editions of major English works--based on original editions and manuscripts--by the project director, Ian Lancashire. Other materials are contributed by members of the English department especially for UTEL. It is already partly on the Web in Representative Poetry On-line, a collection of 1,340 poems by over 215 poets. Inevitably, current UTEL development emphasizes texts from other genres: drama, novels, and non-fiction prose. A full-time faculty member, who works on the project without release time, directs two graduate assistants from the Department of English Ph.D. program, who have year-long contracts. Both do research in 20th-century literature. One is a C++ programmer and Web-site designer for a Faculty of Engineering Writing Facility. The other has no prior programming experience. UTEL has very sound infrastructural support from the Faculty of Arts and Science through its CHASS (Computers in the Humanities and Social Sciences) facility, the heir to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), and from the University Library through its Information Commons and Web Design Group. UTEL project members routinely segment, encode in HTML, document, and index these texts with TACTweb and patterweb, both local search engines. Users will be able to read the texts or print them out as well as search them. We use java, perl, sed, emacs, and other well-known UNIX utilities to design the Web pages. We routinely discuss our work with departmental members of differing professional persuasions. They include postmodernists, deconstructionists, new historicists, philologists, feminists, diehard new critics, psychological critics, language teachers, and computer-based and cultural theorists. Although the university provides all faculty and students with e-mail addresses and Web access, workstations are at a premium still. Many find logging on difficult in practice. Most faculty offices are not yet connected to the university backbone.

The Limits of the Virtual Library

The construction of UTEL-like sites is likely to become common in the near future because of the availability of good Web browsers and of the resources of many university e-text sites, including the texts on the MLA CD-ROM. However, we believe that Web-based virtual libraries need to be reconceptualized to function well within post-secondary education. UTEL-like virtual educational sites sometimes depart from discipline standards. The lack of peer-reviewed material, the instability of sites, and usability problems with on-line materials for reading, note-taking, and in-class reference can be swept away by improving technology. Yet inevitably UTEL-like sites aid a kind of text-based discourse analysis more than literary studies emphasizing biography, histor