Czech Electronic Library Department

The full-text Czech Electronic Library - 19th Century Poetry database is a collection of poetry published during the 19th century with minor overlapping on the chronological axis (i.e. both into the 18th century [Stach] and the 20th century, the basic guideline being a debut by 1900). It carries on from the previous output (from the Thám School to the Lumír School; CD-ROM 2002; published by the ASCR Institute of Czech Literature; contains 600 titles). As the nature of the material required a connection with the previous output, the presented full-text database - Czech Electronic Library - 19th Century Poetry makes 1,200 poetry collections available in a freely accessible internet form.

Within the framework of a single unit, the first book edition (which was chosen in order to retain a uniform approach for the entire Czech poetic production of the period in question, in which most books were only published once) brings together works which appeared at a fairly well-defined stage in Czech literary production by everybody from key authors to marginal poets. It is in the presence of works by forgotten poets, within the overall compass of all levels of poetic production in the given period, regardless of artistic standard, that the importance of the database can be seen.

The project did not aspire to include all journal reprints of poetic output or occasional prints (with exceptions, e.g. Melezínek, Sova, J. Kvapil, Neumann, Machar - in these cases, the occasional prints are published for the sake of the completeness of the author's poetic work). It was beyond the personnel resources of the working group to collect all journal output. This decision was also influenced by the technical procedure for the electronic media: the book and not the poem was chosen as the basic unit for the full-text database. This is balanced by the inclusion of almanachs (e.g. Thám, Puchmajer, Lada Nióla, Máj, Ruch, Almanach secese).

Although the first book edition was chosen as a basis, in justified cases the database also includes other editions, where the collection of poetry was substantially reworked during the author's lifetime and its new form records the poet's creative development, or where an annotated critical edition exists. Hence one work of poetry may appear in the database twice or even more times. Of the older authors, for example, the work of Vrchlický, Krásnohorská and Šolc is presented with variant readings in reworked editions, while from the younger poets, users will find a first edition and a "last hand" edition in the case of works by Dyk, Machar, Sova and Lešehrad, and critical editions in the case of Neruda, Havlíček, Březina and Neumann.

Poetic texts are published in a diplomatic and editorial version with accompanying editorial critical material, not only in view of the various target user levels - from the researcher to the broad cultural public, but primarily because the presence of an editorial version is required by the technical characteristics of the database (and its features, e.g. search, statistics, alphabetical dictionary and frequency dictionary). One exception is the presentation of critical editions (in this case to match the technical features of the database and our textological bases).

Accompanying material is also available to the user. In addition to bibliographical details on the source book (publication, publisher, epigraph, dedication and book description), this also includes commentaries and editorial notes characterizing specific works and classifies them in the broader context of the output of a particular author or of 19th century literary and linguistic development in general. The Czech Electronic Library - 19th Century Poetry full-text database

• provides a library which does not physically exist at any one location, including works which have been quite neglected in recent times;
• presents users with the text of 1,200 books of poetry (primarily first editions) from the oldest modern-era Czech poetry to the beginning of the 20th century. It thus accommodates their need to work with authentic text, i.e. with books that are the object of their research or reading interest, but which cannot be made physically available to them;
• provides all the advantages of digital work with text, both with whole books or their parts (collections, poems, strophes, individual verses and words), and with user-determined text complexes.

Provides:

• rapid and clear searches and display of each book and its structure;
• a choice between two versions: diplomatic (entirely faithful to the original) and edited (i.e. with edited textological input);
• rich full-text searches using many adjustable parameters:
• searches for a single word, a word couple or group of words at different text levels: within a verse, strophe, poem, collection, book or the entire database; a group of related words or different ways of graphically recording the same word can be defined by means of the user dictionary;
• searches for phrases with individual words and motifs;
• automatic collation of variously arranged frequency indexes;
• statistics on the number of words and verses in any selected unit, on the length of a word or verse in any given collection, for any given author, group of poems or authors etc;
• printing and export of defined parts of works;
• the addition to texts of your notes or of information acquired from other sources.

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