Introduction to women writing in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, 1660-1800: A biographical database on CD-ROM

Women Writing in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, 1660-1800: A Biographical Database is a CD-ROM database for Microsoft Access 2.0 that supplies extensive biographical and bibliographical information regarding the lives and works of 446 Restoration and eighteenth-century British women authors. Seventy-three individual data fields for each record display information ranging from basic biographical facts to detailed listings of individual publications to documentation of an author's associations with her literary contemporaries. Compiled from various extant reference works, the data is presented in a heretofore unavailable electronic format that places the equivalent of nearly 3,000 pages of printed text in a single, compact, and easily searchable research tool. A drop-down author name directory and keyword search feature enhance the database's usefulness, as does a one-step print option which allows the user to generate a hard-copy of the complete record for any individual author. When viewing an individual record, the user will have access to all of the biographical information available for that author, as well as a bibliographical listing of both primary and secondary works. Through the use of some basic Access querying, individual fields can be counted and sorted, or combined with other fields, to produce unique reports of various kinds. The CD-ROM is accompanied by a hard-copy introduction that includes a section covering implications for the use of the database in modern scholarship, a history of the development of the project, a listing and description of the primary reference works consulted, and a listing and description of the individual field names and their contents. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...