Chronicle of Higher Education

The "Chronicle of Higher Education", as seen in my last post, offers a wealth of relevant issues dealing with everything from the Internet to innovative schools in Africa. It is a biweekly journal that costs only $45 a year, and it is worth every penny. In the article "Authoritative Online Edition", Thomas Benton, an English professor, relates how difficult it was, prior to the World Wide Web, to locate specific volumes for the collected works of Walt Whitman. He goes on to praise certain digital archives that allow him to have free access to entire collections. One collection is the "William Blake Archive", which "is among the most difficult and expensive for the beginning scholar to assemble, and it is simply impossible to duplicate in print the quality and scope of what is now available on this Web site, short of owning the original works themselves" (C2). The quality and access are what make digital archives so important today. Outside of the "serious" scholars studying the sublime poetry of Blake, now the "curious" can enjoy it too. We sometimes forget that alot of the classical or obscure works were accessible to only the privileged few, but now such works have been unleashed from there most coveted academic chains and allowed to float freely in the fresh air where an unknown and "unadorned" poet awaits to be inspired anew.