Monday, February 13, 2006
MGH
At first I was excited to hear that the Monumenta Germaniae Historica was available for free on the Internet. No more traipsing to the library and lugging home those heavy tomes containing Venantius Fortunatus, Symmachus, Sedulius Scottus, and all the rest.
But my excitement quickly waned when I went to the web site and tried to access the texts. It's the same old story -- image files, one book page per web page, which cannot be searched or copied and pasted as text, and which can be read only in dribs and drabs. Getting a new page over my dial-up connection is slower than molasses. Looking for Cassiodorus, Variae 4.42? Good luck trying to figure out which page it's on. When will the perpetrators of such abominations realize that we need entire texts (or at least large chunks of texts) on single web pages, in text (not image) form? For examples of how it should be done, check out these online texts of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
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But my excitement quickly waned when I went to the web site and tried to access the texts. It's the same old story -- image files, one book page per web page, which cannot be searched or copied and pasted as text, and which can be read only in dribs and drabs. Getting a new page over my dial-up connection is slower than molasses. Looking for Cassiodorus, Variae 4.42? Good luck trying to figure out which page it's on. When will the perpetrators of such abominations realize that we need entire texts (or at least large chunks of texts) on single web pages, in text (not image) form? For examples of how it should be done, check out these online texts of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
