Jonathan Sowers


I evaluated the Online Medieval and Classical Library hosted by the UC Berkley Sunsite at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/. For the purpose of this evaluation I used the following criteria:

 

 

 

The OMACL website, as its name implies, serves as an archive of medieval and classical texts. It currently contains about thirty texts. Firstly, the site provides links to other significant providers of medieval and classical texts and critical material. Links to the archive's texts are ordered by title, author, genre, and language. All four categories are listed on the main page, so each work appears four times. The categories are linked at the top of the list for easy browsing. The archive is fully searchable. A search yields a complete list of all places the keyword(s) appear in any of the texts in the collection, which is a helpful feature for researchers. Preparer's notes are included with the texts and offer some useful information, such as bibliography, translation data, preface, etc.

 

Overall the site is readable, but the notes that accompany some of the texts appeared too small to read. Viewers can circumvent this problem by highlighting the text, copying it (via the edit menu), and pasting it in Word or Notepad (again via the edit menu). The site is very functional in that the design elements consist almost exclusively of black text on white background--no fancy eye-candy, just many relevant texts and a few links.

 

The last site update was on Sept. 10, 2001. The OMACL's developer, Douglas B. Killings, retired from his responsibilities to move on to other projects. However, the site is still managed by Sunsite, so any dead links should be reported to the site manager. Despite the lack of updates, the OMACL remains a major source of texts on the internet.

 

Since the OMACL remains on the UC Berkley Library Sunsite, it retains a high degree of distinction. The OMACL is listed in Yahoo's Medieval Literature category, indicating that it still gets a fair amount of traffic. The .edu suffix indicates the site is associated with an accredited university, so it is widely linked as a resource for medieval material. I highly recommend this site for research purposes.