| Drawing on its own rare book resources and funded by the Mellon Foundation, the University of Virginia began in 1996 an ambitious project of presenting on-line, in digital color image and searchable textual formats, 559 volumes of rare early American Fiction by 81 authors, published from 1775-1850. Included are study resources including biographies of authors, with biographies taken from contemporary references (1850's) and articles on early American fiction from Studies in Bibliography. By 1999, only nine novels are publicly accessible at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/eaf/pubbrowse/. Any teacher wanting to use these resources for a class should make certain that students do have access to them; even with my proxy admission to the site (through my own university's subscrition), I find myself blocked from most of the texts at home. Obviously the University of Virginia is hoping to sell many CD's to support what must be a very expensive, although valuable project. As a scholar, I am thrilled to see these materials; as a teacher, I am frustrated by the Access Forbidden messages. |