The Library is currently running a short trial to Orlando: Women’s Writing, from Cambridge University Press.
Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is a highly dynamic and rich resource for researchers, students, and readers with an interest in literature, women’s writing, or cultural history more generally.
Orlando is not a text archive: it does not print the texts its subjects wrote. Instead, it provides new biographical and critical accounts of the lives and works of its subjects, together with contextual materials relevant to critical and historical readings. With about 8 million words of text and biographical and writing career profiles on over 1430 individuals, it is full of factual, critical, and interpreted material.
From the homepage, it is easy to keyword search for a specific person, author, work or event:
Search results can be refined by fields such as historic period, genre, author nationality to support more specific retrieval. The browse functions allow researchers to explore author profiles, people, organisations, timelines, and the full bibliography of sources cited in Orlando: Women’s Writing. The Get Started guide provides extensive information on making effective use of the database.
Orlando’s content is also structured by a XML tagset, allowing researchers to conduct tag searching. More information on Tags is available here.
The resource is available to trial until Thursday 27th February. Access Orlando: Women’s Writing from Library Search here.
As the purpose of a trial is provide short term institutional access to establish whether the resource is of interest for future sustained access, unfortunately we are not able to extend or repeat trials. Please bear in mind that any links to material within the trial collections will no longer work after the trial ends, so access is temporary.
We’re keen to hear any feedback on this resource, either by posting your thoughts on this blog post below, or by getting in touch with your Liaison Librarian at libliaison@newcastle.ac.uk.