Saturday, March 22, 2014

Review of The Grimm Brothers' Home Page

Earlier today I uploaded my own work on the Scribd site - an article on research tools for The Brothers Grimm tales at the University of Pittsburgh's "Grimm Brothers' Home Page."

In reviewing this page, I'd like to say that you shouldn't be turned off the site by its appearance:


It's not a pretty portion of the University of Pittsburgh website, but I think if you're interested in good content and scholarly work, you'll get a lot out of the Grimm Brothers' Home Page.

While there are some dead links among the many awesome resource links found on this page, the articles connected with these dead links might simply be in the process of being updated. I've known of and used this section of the U of Pitt's website for quite a long time (a few years) and in the past, I know I've accessed and read articles from pages/links that didn't work when I visited just today to compose searches and write a review article on this content.

I've decided to post this information to my blog because, although folklore, fairy tale and fable hunters and readers might already have heard that Grimm's material is on the U of Pittsburgh's website, the information isn't that easy to find when you just hit the main University site page! In fact, I was going to include a link navigation pathway tutorial in my article but I clicked around with ZERO success for several minutes, so I thought the tutorial might take longer to write than a review article! (haha).

I'll try to keep this post short. You can read the article via embedded Scribd (the article I just uploaded to the Scribd site):


And I'll try to just add a few more details NOT COVERED in the Scribd document...

Since this is basically a review of the Grimm Brothers' Home Page - not the "info-article" on resources for researching Grimm tales (which is more what the Scribd article is about), I'll say again in a slightly different way, don't be turned off or turn away from the looks of the Grimm Brothers' Home Page. It's a little index of gold on Grimm topics and information. It just happens to look, well... really junky, sorry to say. In fact, I really hate the appearance of the page, myself, but I return to that section of the U of Pittsburgh's site ALL THE TIME, approximately 10 times per month for the last few years!

A great many Google searches on "Grimm" scholarly topics will lead you to the same section I'm reviewing, which is how I have managed to navigate to find the gems of Grimm info, myself. I bookmarked the page long ago and suggest that you do the same. I'm sure this section of the U of Pitt's site looks this way because not much time has been put into making a flashy page - while most of the time has been dedicated to providing sound information, links, and content on this page. That's the main thing, in my opinion, as when I want to find out what tale type a certain Grimm tale is, I want to be able to find, in rather plain language, the information I'm looking for on the U of Pitt pages.

Use link below - check out Grimm tales and information on folklore, fairy tales, fables, tale types, etc:
 Grimm Brothers' Home Page (U of Pittsburgh)

If you want to make your visit more interesting, I don't know if you can in a visual sense, but you can try whistling the Close Encounters of the Third Kind theme while you browse if that helps.  That's what I do !

:)

As far as attractiveness goes, the page is a low 3 or 4 out of 10, in my opinion, but for content, I'll rate this section of the university website a solid 9 out of 10 (some links don't work).