In any case, the sheer labour of compiling the RICORSO Bibliography this year has finally been enough to persuade me that this is not the best use of mortal time and for that reason I have decided to put an end-date to the chronological span of the website, for which reason the anno domini "2008" now appears on the Home Page. That does not mean that work on RICORSO is complete - only that in future all operations will relate to authors and texts issued before, or those issued after which are essential complements to those written before that time.

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I'm not particular proud of the fact that innumerable hours this summer have been spent correcting codes in the RICORSO “Author-AZ” pages - substituting the ISO 8859-1 character set for the more-or-less random symbols which served heretofore to launch such symbols as ‘ ’, “ ”, é, […] , & and so forth on your screens. The chief problem here was the manner in which the inverted commas appeared when printed by the Search Engine: if not ISO 8859-1, they were printed a our old friend [square]. (The fact that I cannot reproduce it here is a sign of the depth of the problem.)

Part of the correction is, admittedly, pure tidiness mania but part of it is a question of protocol and yet another part a matter of convenience. In relation to the navigation bar at the head of each author-file in the “Authors-AZ” region, for example, it proved a very bad idea to copy individual buttons, as I had done in the past, since the associated java-script was rarely if ever imported into the new file. In order to circumvent that it is necessary to copy each by selecting the corresponding script in “source-side” document.

Easier, by far, is to copy the entire row of buttons in a single table and to delete the unneeded links to “Works”, “Criticism”, “Commentary”, “Quotations”, &c. The result is that, on opening a document, I begin by inserting a 100% table and placing the existing navigation buttons, if working properly, within it, or replacing the whole row with a prepared table if otherwise. The first necessity is, of course, to examine the given file in an internet browser and this means that the addition of materials to any file is necessarily yoked to a global edit of that file.

No bad thing; but the addition of a round of corrections relating to the “special haracters” makes for a time-consuming operation around which I cannot find a way (to employ clumsy grammar). Further to this, I have developed a fetish for eliminating the non-printing spaces in the source-file, and hence saving the bits and bytes that they consume. This is done by temporarily removing the java-script from the file using a simple cut-and-paste technique and then replacing all those invisible line-breaks with a simple space-bar.

Result? A diminution of the source-file length by up to half in some instances - though this does not impact significantly on the KB involved. More tellingly, however, the condensation presents an opportunity to standardise the page formats in many other ways, eliminating for example the variables <i> and <em> from different editorial periods. (These are dictated by the options in Dreamweaver.) I most instances I also alter the uppercase codes such as P ALIGN= to lower-case, while invariably I produce text-block as text-block and lists as lists (i.e., <li> [item] down the page line by line from the left.)

Rationale? It looks better and is easier to manipulate in future.

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In the course of reading up for a lecture on the “Joyce/Yeats Connection” at the Sligo Summer School, I’ve been copying from a sources ranging from the the Yeats-Ellis edition of the Works of Blake annotated in Yeats’s own hand to the contents of several monographs on Joyce. All of these are lodged in the only place I have for such resources, the RICORSO Library section devoted to criticism on “Major Authors”.

The sheer volume of material involved especially where whole texts are concerned possibly breaches the copyright provisions of most countries - though in the case of critics my experience is that they are generally happy to be quoted. I see no other way to manage my archival activities or to integrate my research resources in this single context at this time. A “split” archive, held partly in word-processing format and partly on a website, is of little practical value. In addition, the technology and skills involved in the compilation of a web site are such that reverting to a word-processor file-tree is a retrograde step in practical terms. (I may add, in parenthesis, that I never read without recording in part or whole the text in hand. However problematic that may be, it seems to me part and parcel of the digital age.)

For all these reasons I will continue to up-load the documents I gather whether by copy-typing, OCR scanning or internet capture (not, in fact, the easiest method in Html terms). The process takes time, as does teaching and preparation for teaching - with which it is very often synchronic and even synonymous. Sadly, this means that I must defer any exploration into legal problems and solutions situation pending until I have the time and resources to undertake it. I hope that, when that time arrives, it will self-evidentally be worth putting the existing archive on a project basis with staff in place to address “permissions and commission” as I have long intended.

In the long run what I envisage is a web site very like RICORSO, but so-designed that access to copyrighted texts is governed by a password process linked to a system of payment aimed at reimbursing the actual authors or estate-owners for any texts examined. In the meantime Ricorso remains a private resource access to which is only permitted in the case of “friends, colleagues and students” who enter into a relation of personal trust with the compiler. Any further thoughts?

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Scanners and OCR (Optical Text Recognition) very often render the word modern as modem and I have not always spotted instances of this though fully aware of their likely frequency in all regions of the web site. Today I replaced all instances in the A-Z Authors region, while in the process reassigning a host of “xtra” files - typically critical texts and reviews - from this region to RICORSO Library / “Criticism”.