Bartleby Weekly: April 10, 2000

Bartleby Weekly

Volume I, Issue 4. April 10, 2000

Corbis

Carl Sandburg

Read Pulitzer Prize–Winning Books at Bartleby.com

Bartleby.com demonstrates its commitment to publishing great books online in multiple collections, including offering the largest public library of Pulitzer Prize–winning books. On Monday, April 10th at 3pm the Trustees of Columbia University, who administer the prizes endowed by the publisher Joseph Pulitzer, announce the winners for the year 2000. Bartleby.com congratulates these recipients as well as those of the past with the following full-text services:

Biography or Autobiography: 1919: The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams
Drama: 1920: Beyond the Horizon by Eugene O’Neill
Fiction: 1919: The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington; 1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton; 1923: One of Ours by Willa Cather
Poetry: 1919: Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg

See also: Pulitzer Prize website

Learn of Roosevelt’s Heritage on Earth Day 2000

Earth Day 2000 events begin this week around the globe with the purpose of raising awareness of the fragile connection between humanity and our habitat. A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt pioneered the preservation of natural resources with the reformation of the National Forest Service as well as the creation of nature preserves and parks. Bartleby.com joins the worldwide observances of Earth Day by offering the following chapter from Roosevelt's Autobiography:

The Natural Resources of the Nation

See also: Earth Day website

Searching Bartleby.com, Part II

The “Searching Bartleby.com” article in the March 27, 2000 edition of Bartleby Weekly gave a brief overview of some of the features of Bartleby.com’s new search engine. This article continues that overview to highlight some of the more advanced features of Bartleby.com’s search engine which allow for more complicated searches. These features are accessed via the “Options” button which appears on every search results page. Clicking this button brings up a variety of options that allow you to refine your search query to find exactly the information you need.

One way to refine a search is to use proximity controls. From the Options Page, you can specify whether search words must appear in the same line, sentence, paragraph or page. You can also modify the algorithm by which Bartleby.com’s search displays search results. By default, Bartleby.com’s search takes into consideration relative word ordering, word proximity, database frequency, document frequency, and the position of the search terms in the text. You can change the priority of any of these factors to increase or decrease their weight in any search.

Searches can also be improved by using the same types of wildcards common in word processors. The asterisk wildcard “*” may be used to match just the prefix of a word or to ignore the middle of something. For example, “John*Public” would locate both “John Public” and “John Q. Public.” To locate a number of adjacent words in a specific order, surround them with “ ” double quotation characters. Adding a “+” or “-” symbol before a word will either require or exclude that word from a search.

From the Options page, you can also choose from three different word form options. The first, “Exact,” is the default and will find only exact matches of the search terms. The second, “Plural & Possessives,” broadens the search to include plural and possessive forms of the search terms. Finally, the broadest option, “Any word forms,” finds as many word forms as can be derived from the search terms.

To find more information on any of these search features, you can click on various help files accessible from the Options page.

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