About the Bibliography

The aim of the project is to allow users electronic access to the bibliographies, abstracts, and reviews printed in Spenser Newsletter and its successor, The Spenser Review. Constraints on time prevent us from including announcements, conference abstracts, obituaries, and other items from the journal.

Since the style of the Newsletter has changed over the years, we have re-edited material to bring it in line with a single standard, namely the slightly modified version of University of Chicago style used in the companion website, Sir Philip Sidney World Bibliography. Most abbreviations have been expanded and cross-references and citations of Spenser's works have been normalized.

Material from the journal has also been revised in two other major ways:

In creating the database, we began with recent material and are working our way back to the inception of the journal in 1970. Current material from The Spenser Review will be added to the archive after an eighteen-month delay. For material not yet released by the editor, please consult current issues of the journal. Information on subscriptions and on the journal's sponsor, the International Spenser Society, may be found at the following site:

Our first priority has been to scan, re-edit, and make available as much material as we can in the time available to us. Though we have made close and constant reference to the journal in order to correct scanning errors, and though we have, in the process, amended a good many omissions and mistakes in the journal itself, we have not attempted the daunting task of proof-reading every word against the original issues.

We present the database, then, as a work in progress--one that is generally reliable but not free from small errors. We ask users to support the project by reporting mistakes. We also encourage authors of material on Spenser to provide references to items missed by the journal and to send us abstracts of items that were never annotated. Please use the feature "Add or Correct an Item" on the site itself or write to the Editor, Donald Stump, at stump@slu.edu.

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Saint Louis University for providing major funding for the project, including a two-year SLU2000 Research Assistantship that was used, in part, for scanning and re-editing. Our thanks, as well, to the editors of the journal, who have supplied us with most of the material on the site: A. Kent Hieatt, Elizabeth Bieman, Donald Cheny, M.W. Copeland, Foster Provost, Cherie Ann Haeger, Hugh Maclean, Daryl Gless, Jerome Dees, Theresa Krier, and Sheila Cavanagh. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Jerome Dees and Sheila Cavanagh for generously supplying their original computer files to speed our work.

We also extend our warmest thanks to all the Spenserians who have volunteered to proofread files for scanning errors, particularly Tom Atwell, Allison Bartlett, Jim Broadus, Lisa Celovski, Bob Darcy, Katherine Eggert, Greg George, Tom Herron, Beth Human, Bi-qi Lei, Susan Marty, Tim Moylan, Susan Perry, Charlotte Pressler, Andrew Smyth, Bart van Es, and Matthew Woodcock. All have been wonderfully generous with their time.

Making the complicated computer arrangements needed to publish the project on the World-Wide Web would have been impossible were it not for the efforts of Michael Burks, Elizabeth Boteler, Kristy Chatt, James Herrmann, Michelle Boyer, Mark Rimar, Ted Rubright, Jeff Kapp, and Geoff Strom of the Saint Louis University Web Team. Our heartiest thanks to them.