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Most of the paper based academic journals devoted to Canadian literature have web sites. These sites exist mostly as advertising mechanisms for the journal and in many cases do not constitute a useful presence on the web. Canadian Children's Literature. The New Quarterly, and Textual Studies in Canada all have basic promotional sites which offer subscription information, a list of the contents of the latest issues. and information about the contents of previous issues. Canadian Children's Literature offers one sample review. They do not feature any significant content.
Dalhousie Review has a presence on the web, barely. The front page claims to have links to subscription information, submission information, a history of the Review, and information about the current issue, but the "History of the Dalhousie Review" page had no content when I visited it and the "Current Issue" page displayed the table of contents for the Spring 1996 issue. The site is not well maintained or up to date. It is a poor advertisement for such an old and well respected journal.
ECW's site is professionally done, with an attractive, colourful appearance. It is not an online magazine, but a pointer to the printed version. It lists the contents of current and past issues and gives abstracts of articles in the current issue. Like all such web sites, it provides information on how to subscribe to its paper edition and how to obtain back issues that are still in print. This site also provides links to the ECW Press web pages, which have information about forthcoming ECW Press titles, awards their books have won and so on. This material might be of some use to scholars, but their intended target is book buyers and members of the press.
Studies in Canadian Literature SCL's is another very limited web site. It offers links to the contents of the current issue, a call for papers for an upcoming issue, and links to the tables of contents of two recent issues. One issue of the journal is online: volume 22.1 1997. This is a step in the right direction. It would be nice to see more back issues going online in the future. The SCL site has a link back to the University of New Brunswick Libraries' Electronic Text Centre, which is discussed in another section of this article.
Because it shows a willingness to put content online which people can access for free, Canadian Literature's site is a step in the right direction. Scholarly articles are not online, but book reviews are, for a limited period of time. Their policy is to put reviews on the web shortly after they are received, but to remove them once they are published. This policy reveals a conumdrum which all subscription based paper publications find themselves in: to put content up on the web for free creates competition for their publications. Who would buy something that is available at no cost? The site has a search utility as well as the ususal links to pages about subscriptions, submission policy and advertising rates. It also has the obligatory hot links list. One useful feature is an archive page that has links to the tables of contents of all back issues of Canadian Literature. From issue #154 to the present they also have links to the full text of all editorials. One value added feature is a site-within-a-site dedicated to founding editor George Woodcock . The site includes a short biography of Woodcock, links to articles about him, and links to selected editorials by him. A selection of some of his more important articles from Canadian Literature would enhance this material considerably.
Canadian Poetry has the best academic site because it has real content. It reproduces, in full, the contents of issues 1 through 35 (Fall/Winter 1977 to Fall/Winter 1994). It falls five years short of being complete, but the site is still under construction. The standard advertising information is available and there is an email link to one of its editors. The only flaw is that the search function did not work when I tried it. |
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