It pinpoints the poet's active period, shows you the collected work, and gives you bibliographic information, says Ellis. Perry Willett, the Librarian for English and American Literature, and the Coordinator for Collections Development of Electronic Texts, sees the Database as an important resource for scholars. According to Willett, electronic texts can revolutionize the nature of literary studies by vastly increasing the number of texts and materials researchers, scholars, and students can use. In fact, electronic texts may idle some scholars who used to make a career out of finding obscure texts. These texts could democratize the research process, says Willett.
Markup languages allow the text and the spaces within it to be tagged with particular meanings.
For example, they tell the computer that a title is a title, a footnote is a footnote, and so on. The markup language for the Database allows the computer to identify things like stanzas, verses, dates, and names. While this makes some interfaces less attractive, it does make the whole range of information in the database broadly accessible. Staff welcome your comments or suggestions. As for content, Willett would like to see Chadwyck-Healey, the Database publisher, include the work of more poets in future releases of the Database.