Until June 6, The Library has access to a trial of Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginning to the Present.
Tabs lead the user to a brief overview of an author, a list of writings, a brief life (with bibliography of sources), an overview of life/writing (each with bibliographies), a lengthy timeline of events in the author’s life, and links to mentions of the author in other parts of Orlando. The timelines are quite helpful as is the ability to search by occupation, place and genre. Most interesting, perhaps, is the tag search, which allows the user to combine many different aspects of authors’s lives to create a dataset. I recommend you look at the PDF guide, which provides simple instructions for accessing the many features of the database.
A review of Orlando in Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature provides some background on the project and suggestions on how to best exploit its features. Excepts from additional reviews can be found on the Orlando site.
Please send your comments to Michaelyn Burnette.
(Miranda Hickman. “Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (review).” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 27.1 (2008): 181-186. Project MUSE. Web. 13 May. 2014