Apologies to IASIL members for the long delay in bringing out the Newsletter promised for Autumn 1997-and now offered as Vol. 3, Nos. 1 & 2. Your editor found himself pretending to the functions of a literary critic during September when the compiling ought to have been going on, and then took off for conferences in Monaco and Sydney as the winter nights drew in. At Yuletide he just began the layout process when a short on the motherboard made spaghetti of Mr. Aldus Pagemaker's DTP software. Attempts to acquire a new version revealed that the CD ROM's supplied to UK universities through the CHEST agreement are 'second-handed' from America and prone to optical flaws (you can see daylight through a hole in the silver coating).
On solving that difficulty with the help of anonymous - we think corporate - donor from High Germany, he fell foul of a burnt-out Corona Wire in the component that supplies the heat for the laser printing process. Given a drastic hike in the price of Texas Instruments components over here, it proved cheaper to replace the entire printer with an OKI OL 600ex. [Pay me later, guys ... Ed.] By then, of course, teaching was in full swing … .
Since launching the current series of the Newsletter back in 1995 it has been our notion to 'grow' it as a useful tool for Irish literary scholarship by listing not only conference venues and related publishing events but also by providing running bibliographies of Irish studies leavened with a little commentary on things passing and to come. All of these objectives can easily be tied together in the context of an electronic web site of the kind billed as the Irish Literary Records - which are now being used by an increasing number of IASIL members on Internet. (Go to <http://www.ulst.ac.uk/faculty/humanities/lang+lit/colcentr/dataset>.)
The rapid proliferation of OPACS, publishers' and booksellers' web pages, professional and less professional Irish Studies email subscription lists, and FTP-style delivery systems makes it possible to gather and disseminate huge amounts of information of this sort from a single work station. Up to the very latest moment, however, no such work-station has not been at this drone's disposal. Instead your editor has had to communicate between a home and office festooned in all the unwieldy paraphernalia of informatics culture for all the world like a spaceman in full war-rig, with bundles of diskettes and laplink cables protruding from all ports and apertures.
Now at last the University of Ulster has come up with a giga-disked online pentium machine which has the speed and capacity to supersede the unstable homemade creation of his own dubious engineering skills. And thanks to a telephonic call-back system, the home computer now functions as a terminal accessing the mother in the University.[Not US Eng., please! We think of motherboards in this connection. - Ed.]
The present Newsletter is a dry affair which fulfils few of the aforementioned undertakings. Readers will note, however, that it carries an ISSN, indicating that it is an official acknowledge piece of literature in the despised sense of that term.This means that contributions [Come on, folks! Ed.] can be reported in research appraisal contexts. Attempts to raise revenue by including a half-page advertisement from Gill & Macmillan in the last issue were ultimately abortive due to a failure on the part of that company to come through with the shekels. Perhaps there are invoicing processes we have yet to master. In the meantime the suspicion lingers that this is punishment for uncompleted contracts.
Newly appearing in this issue is a comprehensive list of titles in Irish literary criticism and related subjects. In a 2nd edition of the last Newsletter, printed to cater for IASIL Japan, a comparable list covering 1996 appeared, and this is available on request to all members. Both lists and their successors will be placed on Internet at the IASIL Website at <http://www.ulst.ac.uk/iasil/gazette/current>.