Cook, Hardy M. Review of *The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM." Appeared in *Shakespeare Newsletter* (46.2, Summer 1996, 33-34) with some minor revisions. (WSBCD REVIEW) Harner, James L., ed. The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM: 1990-1993. Cambridge UP, 1996. ($240 List Price) System Requirements: Macintosh (System 7 or later; 4 MB of RAM) and PC (Windows 3.1+ or Windows 95 (386 or later; 8 MB of RAM). The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM: 1990-1993 is the first release in The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM 1900-Present project, which, when complete, will "provide annotated entries for all important books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced since 1900." This release "includes coverage of more than 12,000 works published or produced during 1990-1993 as well as several thousand additional reviews of books, productions, films, and audio recordings)." The plan is to update The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM annually, moving forward one year and backwards three. The next disk, scheduled for release in early 1997, will, thus, cover 1987-1994, with 24,700 plus entries and another 30,000 to 40,000 reviews, newspaper pieces, and the like appended to these entries. The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM differs from the print bibliography in many ways. One obvious difference in the media is physical: The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM: 1990-1993 fits on one CD-ROM, while the four print volumes that it constitutes take up three inches of space on the shelf. In addition, the CD-ROM bibliography, as its documentation indicates, "both cumulates and significantly expands the annual bibliographies in Shakespeare Quarterly, it omits several entries in the latter (especially works peripherally related to Shakespeare, most obituaries of performers, abstracts of unpublished convention papers, and operas not based on Shakespeare texts), condenses some (especially by omitting non-speaking roles in entries for productions), and conflates others (especially abstracts of published works and book or production reviews originally listed as separate entries)." The 1987-1994 edition will no longer provide entries for productions of operas and will have many entries conflated for more efficient searching. I am sure that I am not the only Shakespearean whose ritual upon receiving the print World Shakespeare Bibliography in the mail is to turn to the "Author Index" in the back and check my own citations. I thought that this ritual might be the place to begin with this examination of The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM, especially with my rather modest output during these four years. In the 1990 print World Shakespeare Bibliography, I had two citations: 1043 was a reference to eight abstracts in ShN from the SAA seminar "Using the Computer in Shakespeare Studies" of which I was a participant, while 1098 was a citation of the abstract itself. In 1991, I also had two citations: 973, a piece I did for ShN on a dual exhibition at the Folger Library, "Royal Autographs and First Folios Exhibited at Folger"; and 1322, a citation of abstracts of four articles I made for ShN. In 1992, there were four citations: 673, the 1992 Summer Festivals list I compile for ShN; 1065, a reference to my review of Janet Adelman's Suffocating Mothers for ShN; and 3103 and 4654, my essay "Jane Howell's BBC First Tetralogy: Theatrical and Televisual Manipulation" in LFQ, and a cross reference to it. In 1993 were a citation for the 1993 Summer Festivals list (827) and an entry for the SHAKSPER Listserv (962). After locating these in the print bibliography, I turned to the CD-ROM version. I began by starting the Cambridge DynaText Reader. From the opening screen, I double clicked the World Shakespeare Bibliography from the book collection. What appeared to the left is the table of contents - the four major divisions of the taxonomy ("General Shakespeareana," "Play Groups," Individual Works," and "Indexes"). The subdivisions of these major divisions are accessible by a mouse click on the plus sign to the left. In a separate window to the right is the text, the entries themselves with hypertext links to cross-references indicated by a red arrow. With typical power-user hubris (that is, not consulting the User's Manual), I entered "Cook, Hardy" in the "Find" panel at the bottom of the screen. I got seven "hits" as indicated on the first line on left side by a red "7" next to the table of contents title, The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM: 1990-1993. Just below, "General Shakespeareana" was highlighted with a red "4" next to the plus sign; on the right was the 1992 Summer Festivals entry (1174). Just above these are thirteen icons. DynaText does not as yet provide "bubble" help identifying the icons, but the first icon, a flashlight, is normally used for "Find," while the second and third - a triangle pointing left and right respectively - are used for "Previous" and "Next." So I clicked the right pointing triangle, and viola at the top of the text window now was displayed citation 1684, the 1993 Summer Festivals entry; on the left, "General Shakespeareana" remained highlighted. One more click on the "Next" icon revealed a reference to my Suffocating Mothers review, embedded in the citation for the work itself (1926). Another click brought me to the entry for SHAKSPER (2012). The next click took me out of "General Shakespeareana" to the two citations under "Individual Works," my essay on Jane Howell (6265) and its cross reference (9822). The last hit for "Cook, Hardy" was to the "Authors Index" to which I will return in a moment. I next clicked the flashlight icon, which returned me to the "Find" panel at the bottom of the screen with "Cook, Hardy" still highlighted. A click on the fourth icon, a flashlight with in a circle with a slanted line through it, returned me to the "Find" panel and erased my previous search. Next, I searched for "Hardy Cook." The four hits (one in "Play Groups"; the other three in "Individual Works") were embedded references to the four article abstracts I prepared for ShN in 1991 (3883, 7077, 7809, and 9090). With "Cook, Hardy" and "Hardy Cook" uncovering seven of the ten citations from the print bibliography, I decided to see what a boolean search (and, or, not) would reveal, so I searched for "Hardy and Cook." The resulting number of hits (28) indicated in the table of contents window is misleading. In the first three major divisions of the taxonomy, the search engine clearly counted a single entry as two hits (the appearance of "Hardy and Cook" or "Cook and Hardy" together in a single citation counted as two hits and not as one; further, when I added my middle initial, the same single citation counted as three hits when the "M." was present.) What I do not understand is why in the "Author Index" the "Cook" of the two authors before and after me (Carol, Dorothy, Heather, and Judith) were also highlighted and counted. This anomaly not withstanding, the boolean search of "Hardy and Cook" uncovered eleven citations (1174, 1684, 1865, 1926, 2012, 3883, 6265, 7077, 7809, 9090, and 9822) and the "Author Index" entry. The only citation I found by the boolean search that did not show up in the two previous simple searches was 1865 - a reference to my piece on the dual Folger Library exhibition, which was embedded in the citation for the catalogue Peter Blayney wrote for his exhibit - The First Folio of Shakespeare. I have purposely postponed discussing the "Author Index" entry until now. The taxonomy in the left-hand window can be scrolled through to browse the CD-ROM bibliography in a manner analogous to using the print bibliography. I mentioned earlier what I do when I receive the print bibliography in the mail. I could have approached the CD-ROM version is a similar manner. Clicking the plus sign next to "Indexes" reveals its four divisions - "Authors," "Actors," "Dramatists," and "Subjects." By clicking "Authors," the letters of the alphabet appear. By highlighting "C" and typing "Cook, Hardy" in the "Find" panel or by scrolling through the Cs, I reached "Cook, Hardy," revealing the eleven citations I have already uncovered through my three searches. To reach any of these citations, all I needed to do was click on the citation number. Viola, all over again, power-user hubris pay back, but what did I learn from this experiment? First, I learned that all of the citations except those to the unpublished abstract of my SAA seminar paper that were in the print version appeared in the CD-ROM (as the document to the bibliography indicates)* and that the article abstracts that had received one citation in print were embedded in the four abstracted articles in the CD-ROM as was my review of Suffocating Mothers and the Folger Library dual exhibition piece (again, as indicted in the documentation). Second, I learned that one can use the indexes and the table of contents (taxonomy) to search or browse The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM in a manner comparable to the ways one uses the print version and that one can initiate both simple and complex searches of the database. In fact, the power and speed of searching is the clearest advantage the CD-ROM has over its print counterpart. By using the keyword, proximity, and boolean search capabilities of the CD-ROM, one can identify studies in moments that would require skimming through compete volumes of the print bibliography. Let me illustrate. A simple search to find references to "Fluellen" might start in the table of contents section: Click "Indexes"; click "Subjects"; click "F"; type "Fluellen" in "find" box; resulting in two hits of articles discussing Fluellen. The taxonomy, however, indicates other hits. To see what they were, I could scroll through the list or return the text window to the beginning and enter "Fluellen" in the "Find" panel. Either way ten reviews of Henry V with stage credits for Fluellen are located in addition to the initial two references to essays. However, much more sophisticated searches are possible using the "Search Forms" dialog box. To reach it, I clicked on "Book" from the menu bar and selected "Search Forms." The top half of this dialog box records "Past Searches." Below this is a search form selection panel, with the default display being "Standard," and another "Find" panel. At the bottom are four buttons: "Find," "Cancel," "Previous," and "Next." In this default configuration, "Search Forms" acts just like the "Find" panel at the bottom of the screen. Clicking on "Standard" reveals the other search forms: "Entry Title," "Entry Author," Entry Number," "Proximity Search," "Keyword Search," and "Keyword and Language." The "Search Forms" dialog box can be left open and used to maneuver through searches with the results displayed in the text window. "Entry Title" is used to search words in titles; "materialist," for example, appears in three titles in this CD-ROM. "Entry Author" locates only the author, editor, compiler, and the like of entries. "Entry Number" quickly locates citations by their numbers. "Keyword" searches for entries that contain particular words in their keyword field. "Keyword and Language" searches entries in a particular language: "King Lear" and "fr" locates Yves Thoret's "Le m'canisme de d'chirement dans Le roi Lear." "Proximity Search" is especially powerful, locating, for instance, "Branagh" within "10" words of "Ado." These searches can be further enhanced using wild card operators "*" and "?"; thus "act*" will locate act, acts, acting, actor, actors, action, and so on, while "advi?e" will locate all instances of both "advice" and "advise." Boolean operators can be used to construct very complex searches: "(Hamlet and Q1) or (Hamlet and bad quarto)" will find all cases of "Hamlet" occurring within twenty words of either "Q1" or "bad quarto." Other complex searches can take advantage of the underlying Standard General Markup Language (SGML) encoding of each bibliographical entry to perform context searches using the keywords "containing," "directly," "in," "inside," "null," "in," "with," and "=." I repeat the searching tools illustrate the clearest advantage of the CD-ROM over its print counterpart, yet there is still many more ways to use the CD-ROM. I mentioned above that The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM contains cross- references - hyperlinks. Clicking on Venus and Adonis in the table of contents window brings the text window to the Venus and Adonis, Scholarship and Criticism, Editions and Texts sections. Scrolling down the text reveals a number of hyperlinks, indicated by a red arrow to the left side of the entry. Double clicking the red arrow at Jonathan Bate's "Sexual Perversity in Venus and Adonis" brings up a cross-reference to Bate's Shakespeare and Ovid, a book that incorporates the essay that appeared in Yearbook of English Studies. The "Annotation" feature allows users to create their own hyperlinks, bookmarks, and notes that are appended to entries the user selects. Selecting "Book" from the menu bar and then "Create Annotation" from the submenu bring up the annotation choices: "Create Bookmark," "Start Hyperlink," "End Hyperlink," "Create Note." There are also icons for creating a bookmark, opening a note, starting a hyperlink, and ending a hyperlink. If I want to append a note to an entry, I would first select "Create Note," then compose, name, and save the note. If I wanted to bookmark this entry, I would select "Create Bookmark" and then name it. If I wanted to hyperlink this entry to another, I would select "Start Hyperlink," move to the entry I wanted to link, select "End Hyperlink," and name the cross reference. Having done these things, I could then use the "Manage Annotations," submenu under "Book" directly to go to a bookmarked entry, note, or hyperlink. Red symbols to the right indicate bookmarks, notes, and user-created hyperlinks. Clicking these also activates them. The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM surely provides an impressive array of tools for searching and manipulating within its database, but how does one move that information out of the database into other forms? One can copy text to the clipboard. Any amount of contiguous text can be highlighted in the text window and saved to the clipboard. From the clipboard that information can be pasted into an application. One can even copy material to the clipboard with its SGML encoding. In preparing this review, I have many times toggled between the CD-ROM and Word 7.0 to paste names, titles, and other information directly into this document. However, others times, I wanted to print or export the entries for later use. Herein lies my biggest complaint with this version of the DynaText software used with the CD-ROM. To print or export an entry, that entry must first be highlighted in the table of contents window. If this is not done, printing begins with the first entry and would continue to the last unless the printing is suspended. I have in my recycling bin next to my desk about six copies of the first few pages of The World Shakespeare Bibliography I printed mistakenly. This difficulty is not the responsibility of James Harner or the Cambridge University Press but of Electronic Book Technologies, Inc., of Providence, Rhode Island, the company that makes the DynaText program. Not only should printing be simplified, one should also be able to tag a list of entries to be printed or exported at the same time rather than having to process by single entries. The only other major suggestion I would offer to improve the DynaText interface would be the addition of an icon that would return the user to the beginning of the text. As I have noted, a search proceeds from the current location in the text - this was the reason that when I was in the Indexes after I highlighted the letter "C" I could type "Cook, Hardy" in the "Find" panel and go directly to my name in the "Author Index." Other changes are planned for the next few releases. For The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM: 1987-1994, users will be able to limit searches by document type (book monograph, book collection, article, dissertation, film, production, recording, and so on). It is also hoped that DynaText will build in features that allow users to display hits in short form (rather than scrolling immediately to the first hit) and allow marking of multiple records for printing or exporting. It is also planned that this version will have some omnibus entries that group miscellaneous general-interest pieces (such as the newspaper articles on the discovery of the Globe and Rose; general pieces on the RSC; travel pieces and general introductions to major Shakespeare festivals; organizations (SAA, Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft). In the future are also plans for changes in the taxonomy (especially in the sections for Editions, Apocrypha, and Biography). Much credit should be given to the Cambridge University Press for keeping the cost of The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM affordable for the average end-user. All too often the temptation is to cater to the library market with outrageously overpriced CD-ROMs that only libraries can afford. Also, every expectation is that yearly upgrades will be similarly low-priced; my hope would be that an upgrade would cost roughly the same as buying a single copy of the Shakespeare Quarterly print edition. The World Shakespeare Bibliography on CD-ROM gets my enthusiastic endorsement - even with the limitations of the DynaText included with this first release, this is the best bibliographic software I have ever used. Do I plan to upgrade every year? No doubt about it. Does this mean that I will no longer purchase the print version with my Shakespeare Quarterly subscription? Well. . . The most current print version is, and it appears that it will remain, available a year or more ahead of its CD-ROM counterpart. Thus, until the print and CD-ROM WSB are released at the same time, to be able to have access to the most recent material on a subject, it would still be wise to have the Shakespeare Quarterly version available. The print version does look good on my bookshelf, but it does take up quite a bit of space. Notes * Abstracts of unpublished papers are also soon to be excluded from the print bibliography.