A searchable collection of links, created and maintained by Akihito Ishikawa of the Department of English at Nagasaki College of Foreign Languages, Japan. The site is recently and frequently updated and receives approx. 100 visitors a day. For sheer number of links available, this is an excellent site, containing links to over 300 sites from individual authors and their texts to collections of author sites and general history, reference and American culture sites. However, some of the links are redundant; they lead merely to other link sites which repeat information, and it can get frustrating when clicking through multiple links, looking to find a specific author, or information, merely to find yet another collection of links rather than expected content. For example, a site advertised only as Amy Tan was merely a tiny collection of links, which repeated the links on another, better organized site. The result was that there appeared to be two sources, but one was merely a rehashing of the info on the other. Some screening by the site's editor for quality, rather than quantity, could make this site more user- friendly.
The site is carefully and well-organized, with twenty-six general categories, as well as being organized by period and author's last name. Some of the sections are very small, the American drama page featured only six links, but since Ishikawa clearly updates and searches for new content, one would expect the under-represented categories to fill out, eventually. The frame arrangement makes for easy navigation, and when one clicks an "outside" link, the loading of a new browser window makes it easy to return to where you were. This could, however, also be confusing and technically difficult for those who are less familiar with framed websites, but there is a "non-frame" version of the site.
General categories include:Meta-Resource Lists; Movements & Genre; Poetry; Drama; Southern Literature (misspellings); Minority Literature; Women Writers; Etexts: Collections; Etexts: Anthology; Electronic Journals; Map Collections; Literary Theory; References; Teaching Resources; American Studies; U.S. History; Cultural Studies; Cyber Culture; Art/Architecture; Music; Feminism; Gender/Sexuality; Scholarly Societies; Miscellaneous; References.
Most of the links have no editorial annotation at all or merely a site author or Institution credit; this means that the researcher must go to the linked website to find out exactly what its content is, and whether it is what he/she is looking for. The usefulness of some of these links for a researcher without time to check every link under a general category, therefore, is reduced. In addition, there are some linking errors within the site, although Ishikawa does encourage visitors to report dead or broken links. For example, clicking on "American Women Poets" led me to a page that was about Dexter Wallace (pseud for Edgar Lee Masters) rather than the expected link to a list of American women poets.
The graphic on the site's first page, Grant Wood's American Gothic, leads to an interesting discussion of the painting; however, the directly quoted material is not correctly cited and sets a poor precedent for students who may be learning how to incorporate research into their own work. A link is provided to the original website that is being quoted, but unless the browser checks, there is no specific disclaimer, and no quotation marks around non-original material. Finally, there are quite a few minor spelling errors, which could be easily caught and corrected with a spell checker.
In general, I recommend this site to the web-searcher who has plenty of time and wants to explore all the sites under a given category, and perhaps find information that s/he did not know s/he was looking for. I myself found a number of useful links which I had not previously known about, and feel that this is a worthwhile trip for someone who wants to find most of the important American Literature sites on the Web.