User blog:George Dance/July / August 2013

July marked the second anniversary of PPP, but the occasion went unnoticed; Penny and I had too much work to do.

The major project continued to be revising already-posted articles on poets (especially those from 2011), to bring them up to present standards. As noted in the last message, we are concentrating on:


 * Bibliography: adding publishers' information, new books, or even entire bibliographies as needed, to each poets' publications. We are still using WorldCat to compile unique bibliographies, which seems even more essential than ever; even where we instead use an authoritative source like the Poetry Foundation, we find some books that weren't added.
 * Book links: We are not just adding lists of books, but live-linking them as much as possible. In addition to Project Gutenberg and Internet Archive, we've begun using Google Books, the University of Michigan, and the Hathi Trust. There are now hundreds of books that can be accessed and read from PPP with just a few clicks: something that can't be done from any other poetry site.
 * External links: We also continue to adding links to poems, on sites like Poets' Corner and PoemHunter and in anthologies published on Bartleby.com, and to biographical sites (like NNDB and the Cambridge History of English and American Literature. A new bio site we discovered this month was Poets' Corner (Westminster Abbey). On the other hand, we lost a site -- the one we were linking to for Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition information shut down. We'll have to address that in the future; for now, we're putting 1911 EB articles right onto PPP.
 * Authority control info: We're still adding VIAF (the most commonly used authority control) numbers from Wikipedia; that was the original reason for the upgrading, after all. We've also learned how to add VIAF numbers for those who don't have them on wikipedia, so we can upgrade almost everyone. (Just a few writers have no VIAF number online at all.)

September 1 found us near the end of H, leading to optimism that the 19th-century poets will all be reviewed before year-end. But there's no rush.

We also continue to to add new pictures, and even found time to add some new poems. Take a look at As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Gerard Manley Hopkins and The Cherry Tree by A.E. Housman, to get an idea of what we're trying to accomplish in that area.

Last but definitely not least, I'd like to give a shout-out to User:Skittlehappymatt, who joined in this period and is already our second most prolific contributor. Welcome aboard, Matt, and thank you for all your help.