About the Jane Austen Digital Library

Update - May 28, 2010: Dear visitors, please note that this site was created as a prototype digital library for a school project and has no commercial purpose. I am NOT using it to actively perform research on the Austen-related web (although you are welcome to use it that way). This "about" page was created as part of the requirement of the school project so it sounds fancier than it really is. If you'd like your resource to be added to the search engine and resources list, please feel free to contact me at khwhitma@eden.rutgers.edu and I'll be happy to take a quick look.

Also it's probably pretty obvious by now that I'm not a web design wizard - so everyone is advised to view the site in Firefox, as that's the only browser I tested it in. Sorry for any usability problems.

Thank you for visiting the Jane Austen Digital Library. This library has been created by Kristin Whitman, a student in the Masters of Library and Information Science at Rutgers University. The Jane Austen Digital Library is a collection of free resources on the web related to Jane Austen, her works, and her life.

The main search page is intended to serve as a starting point for Jane Austen researchers. It can be used by those looking to call up a particular passage in her collected works, as it searches the full text of these as available from sources such as Project Gutenburg and Bibliomania. Or, it can be used as a starting point for those wishing to see conversations that have taken place about Austen's works, as it performs a search through the Austen blog-o-sphere. It can also be used by those who want to continue to participate in ongoing conversations about Jane Austen through monitoring the aggregated RSS feeds of posts and news about Austen scholarship.

The decision to include fan generated content and personal webpages related to Jane Austen in this search engine was not an easy one. It is not my desire to direct young students interested in Jane Austen to materials on the web which may not offer completely reliable information. However, I feel that the fan content about Austen on the web has value from a sociological, cultural, and historical perspective, and those wishing to study the recent explosion of interest in Austen's life and works will also find it useful to search through the materials generated by Austen fans in our modern internet age. The inclusion of a page in the Jane Austen index is not an endorsement of the quality of the factual information on that page.

The Jane Austen Search Engine was created using the Google Custom Search application. For sites that contain links out to other places on the web that have some relevance to Jane Austen's works or life, I have selected the "index all pages linked from this page" option available from the Google Custom Search builder application. Thus it would be very difficult to generate a complete list of sites that will actually be searched by the engine, as these sites probably number in the thousands. A selected list of free web resources specifically directed to Jane Austen, which are searched by the Jane Austen Search Engine (powered by Google), can be seen on the Resources page.

Any questions or comments about the site may be directed to khwhitma@eden.rutgers.edu.