History

A handwritten list of books

The work that would evolve into the Online Quevedo Bibliography began in 1968 with a hand-written list of articles and books organized for my doctoral proposal. This was first supplemented by an annotated index card system and then converted into a type-written bibliography set out in alphabetical order. It consisted of some 200 titles, and armed with this, in 1969, Clare and I set out to the University of Barcelona, Spain, to visit Prof. José Manuel Blecua, the internationally renowned Quevedo expert and the man who first introduced me to the poetry of Quevedo while I was studying at the Unversidad Internacional Menéndez y Pelayo, Santander in July-August, 1963). Professor Blecua was very kind to us. He suggested that I read several supplementary articles that were not yet on the bibliography, and encouraged me to read the love-poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Here, he informed me, was an open field in which I could work. I followed his advice and in 1975, the doctoral thesis -- A Stylistic Study of the Love-Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo (Toronto, 1975) -- was defended, complete with bibliography. Over the ensuing years, the bibliography continued to grow.


An Ongoing Online Bibliography

In 1995, while visiting Oaxaca, Mexico, with the University of New Brunswick Faculty Exchange Program, I realized that the people I was working with in Oaxaca knew far more about computers than I did. In fact, compared with them, I had a hatred and fear of computers. So, to combat this phobia, I decided to invest the $1,500 I had been given as a merit award for research at St. Thomas University in a Certificate of Multi-Media Studies with the University of New Brunswick. I began this certificate in the summer of 1996 and completed it in the summer of 1999. While I was engrossed in daily studies for the certificate, Clare started to incorporate the bibliography onto the new web page that she was building for me. In the Fall of 1999, we went online with the Ongoing Online Quevedo Bibliography that remained in place, constantly updated, from 1999-2009.



From Bibliography to Searchable Database

The Online Quevedo Bibliography was taken down in May 2009, just before my retirement (age 65) from St. Thomas University. I went to the Harriet Irving Library at the University of New Brunswick in June of that year and discussed with John Teskey, the Director of Libraries, the possibility of relocating the Bibliography to the Harriet Irving Library. He agreed, and the bibliography went back online again, this time courtesy of UNB. At the same time that we relocated, we discussed the possibility of converting the bibliography into a searchable database. While maintaining the bibliography at UNB for another five years (2009-2014), Clare and I worked with members of the UNB Libraries’ Centre for Digital Scholarship to establish the database.

First, Clare typed all the titles from the bibliography into the reference management software platform, RefWorks. Then the RefWorks collection (now numbering some 2,800 titles) was ingested into the Drupal content management system and transformed into a searchable database. This searchable database is indexed by Google Scholar and enables the bibliographer, via some very simple commands, to locate books and articles. It also enables the researcher to discover whether they are available electronically and if so, to download them and read them.