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Major Authors on CD-ROM: Walt Whitman

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I. BRIEF OVERVIEW OF STRUCTURE AND CONTENT:

Primary Source Media's Major Authors on CD-ROM series celebrates an author's imagined world. Each disc in this series gathers as comprehensive as possible a collection of an author's (or authors') published works and, where available, manuscripts. Because these are placed in a fully-searchable format from which they can be queried--and, in effect, seen--from any "angle" a user chooses, the program provides the capacity to build a personalized index and concordance. To this core are added multimedia features--graphics, audio, video--as appropriate. But at the heart of the discs is the author's works, searchable in broad, specific, and highly interpretive ways.

II. STARTING UP WALT WHITMAN:

Place the CD-ROM in the computer's CD carrier by pressing the button outside of the CD-ROM drive to open and close it. Click on the Start button, select Programs, then select Primary Source Media from the pullout menu. Select the Walt Whitman icon from the submenu. If you have any difficulties starting up the CD-ROM, please ask a staff member for assistance.

III. USING WALT WHITMAN:

The Tool Bar

At the top of the screen is a tool bar that contains "buttons," which allow you to use this program efficiently. Following is a list of those buttons and a description of how each works:

  • Quick Help: For detailed information about this program and all of its features, click on Quick Help and Contents. A menu of help topics will be displayed: For an introduction to Primary Source Media, Major Authors and the entire on-line help guide, click on MAJOR AUTHORS Basics. For a full description of menu commands, click on Command References. For procedures for using MAJOR AUTHORS, click on Step-by-Step Instructions. For additional information, click on Customer Support.

  • TOC (Table of Contents): lists all of the works in the database. Use the TOC if you know what type of work you're looking for, or to view the different types of works on the disc. First, click on TOC on the tool bar. Then choose Type (genre), Title, Author or Date. Let's say you've chosen Type. To view the contents of a folder (located to the left of an item in the TOC list), double-click on either the + sign (to the left of the folder), the yellow folder itself or the document type name (Manuscripts, for example). To hide the contents of a folder, double-click on either the - sign, the yellow folder or the document type name. To open a document, double-click on a document title. For other ways to sort the contents, click on Related Topics. (The same nesting structure applies to Title, Author and Date lists.)

    Note: After you've selected a document or a photograph by double-clicking on its title, you will come to a screen entitled ImageViewer. In it you will find that the screen is divided in two horizontally. The top screen contains the image; the bottom a description of the image. Also, the tool bar contains 1) page navigation buttons; 2) a Go To button that allows you to choose a specific page in the document; 3) buttons for rotating the image (see the arrows); 4) zoom (in and out) buttons (see the magnifying glasses).

  • Search: allows you to search the database. Click on the Search button on the tool bar. Then enter your search term(s) in the appropriate box. Click on Search (or Return). You will come to a Search Results box, which contains a Total Hits box and the listing of works in which your query word(s) was found. Click on a work (in blue). In the ImageViewer, your search term(s) will appear in red in the lower screen (which also describes the text); the upper screen contains the image of the same text but does not highlight words. (For a more comprehensive description of search types--Natural, Standard and Advanced--click on Quick Help, Contents, Step-by-Step Instructions and Searching for Information, respectively.)

  • Index: Click on this button to look for a topic in the Major Authors Index. Use the Prev and Next buttons in the Index box to move up and down a page. Or use the alphabetized tabs at the bottom of the screen to move elsewhere in the Index. Click in the hypertext (the blue underlined numbers) to go to the place in the text to which the citation refers.

  • Cross Ref.: Click on the document you want to cross reference; then click on Cross Ref. (If the Cross Ref. button is inactive, the active window is not a document window.) The Cross Reference box contains two windows, divided horizontally. The top window lists the citation for the current document; the bottom displays the index terms. Click on the index term (in blue) to move to the full citation in the index.

  • Bookmark: displays the Bookmark and Revisit lists. Bookmarks appear as full bibliographic citations for the document and page number. Click on the Bookmark button. Notice the Bookmarks and Restore tabs. The Bookmarks tab allows you to create a bookmark, recall a bookmark or edit the bookmark list. Restore opens the selected bookmark citation. Bookmarks may be copied for use as references in your own documents. (For a more comprehensive description of the Bookmark function, click on Quick Help, Contents, Command Reference, Tool Bar, Bookmark, respectively.)

  • Go Back: Click this button to go to a previous citation in the Revisit list. Repeated clicks will bring you, in reverse order, back through the Revisit list.

  • Print/Save: displays options and prints or saves the current page or selected pages in the active Full Text window.

  • Clear: closes all windows and clears the current Revisit list of searches and current bookmarks.

A Few Suggestions:

  • Screen Sizing: Because of the kinds of images and the way they are displayed in this program, consider clicking on the screen- expansion icon in the upper-right corner of the introductory screen (the one with the two cascading squares). And you can do the same with the ImageViewer screen as well. Then you won't have to scroll left and right so often and will be able to view at one time a greater area of an image or a page of text.

  • Closing a screen: In this program, you will find yourself closing screens fairly often. When the Go Back button is unavailable, or when you simply want to go somewhere else in the program, click on the X icon in the upper-right corner of the screen you want to close.

IV. EXITING THE WALT WHITMAN AND REMOVING THE CD-ROM:

Exit the program by selecting Exit from the File menu. You should find yourself back at the Windows desktop. You can then eject the CD-ROM by pressing the button below and to the right of the CD carrier. Please place the CD-ROM back in its case and return it to an Etext Center assistant.