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Find Literary Criticism at the Internet Public Library

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT:

Ken Irwin
Katie Stottlemyer
David S. Carter
4033 SEB
610 E. University
Ann Arbor, MI
48109-1092
ipl@ipl.org

April 28, 1998

Students seeking literary criticism on the Internet, rejoice! The Internet Public Library's brand new Literary Criticism collection (/ref/litcrit/) offers a fast and easy way to find criticism and biographical information for over 100 authors and their works.

Focusing primarily on British and American authors, the Literary Criticism collection fills a gap that has long frustrated students, teachers and librarians looking for high-quality literature resources online. "We have always gotten lots of questions about finding lit crit online--it's been one of the hardest kinds of questions to answer. We hope this new collection will be a valuable resource for making the Internet's best literary criticism easy to find," says Ken Irwin, the IPL's User Services Librarian.

The Collection contains links to sites about many important English language authors. The authors selected primarily represent the literary canon taught in high schools and college English classes. The collection was aimed to serve high school and college students, although it is expected to be of service to more advanced scholars as well.

Many of the author entries include biography and interesting, relevant non-literary sources in addition to the criticism. Attempts were made to obtain the critical pieces from reputable sources. Users can browse for criticism and biographical information by author name, period, or work title.

The collection was designed by Ken Irwin, Katie Stottlemyer, and David Carter with assistance from Patricia Memmott, Beth Atkinson, and Caitlin Tillman. Over a four month period, these students and staff members researched more than one hundred authors and hundreds of web sites, choosing the over 1000 sites which make up the collection at the time of opening.