THE THOMAS HARDY ASSOCIATION
LINKS

DIRECTOR: ROBERT SCHWEIK
© 1999-2003

NORTHERN LIGHT

DESCRIPTION:

Address: http://www.northernlight.com [NOW CLOSED]
Contact: David Seuss (ceo@northernlight.com)
Date: 04/08/03

Northern Light Technology provides a search engine with two special features: it creates "Custom Search Folders"--categories into which search results are arranged--and it can search not only the WWW but a "Special Collection" of text sources, or both.

COMMENT:

A combined WWW and Special Collection search for "Thomas Hardy" resulted in 26,215 hits arranged in "Custom Search Folders" with such names as "Search Current News," "Special Collection Documents," "Thomas, Dylan," "Hardy, Thomas--Works, Studies, and Biography," "House of Commons," "Cabernet Sauvignon," and the titles of several Hardy novels. Materials grouped in a folder such as "Cabernet Sauvignon" were related to another Thomas Hardy. There was a tendency for the contents of "folders" to overlap or not to include obviously relevant material. On the other hand, folders for individual novels such as Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Far from the Madding Crowd yielded results not usually found by other search engines, particularly reviews of film versions of Hardy novels, including some from foreign sites, though also many sites of trivial or of only peripherial interest. For searches related to Hardy, then, Northern Light's grouping of results into folders was helpful in a limited way, though at times inconvenient and/or potentially misleading.

Of its "Special Collection," Northern Light says it provides access to more than 25 million articles from over 7100 newspapers, journals, and databases; these are searchable by keyword(s) or by journal title. Most of the contents of this collection appears to extend back no later than 1995, though some to 1990. For each article the title, source, document size, author, copyright holder and a brief summary is provided. Upon a payment, usually ranging from $1-$4, the text of an article will be made available on screen. Northern Light's database includes many scholarly journals--e.g., Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Novel, Philological Quarterly, Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, PMLA, Review of English Studies, Studies in Philology, Studies in Short Fiction, Women and Language--and, also, other less scholarly sources such as Cyclopedia of Literary Characters, Contactplots and many (often not widely-known) newspapers. A "Publication Search" of the Northern Light "Special Collection" for "Thomas Hardy" turned up 10,675 items, ranging from scholarly articles in such journals as The Review of English Studies and Philological Quarterly to film reviews in such newspapers as The Daily Telegraph, The Bloomington Pantagraph, and the Arizona Republic.

For an extensive and technically sophisticated review of Northern Light and other WWW search engines, see our Link B 15, "Internet Finding Tools."

DISCLAIMER:

TTHA can give no assurance of the validity of claims made or the quality of service offered by any vendor.