Yale Professor Wins a Choice award for a CD-Rom on Cervantes

A CD-Rom on the life and work of Miguel de Cervantes edited by Professor Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria of Yale University has received Choice magazine’s Outstanding Academic Book Award for 1998.

The multi-media reference work about Spain’s most celebrated writer is part of the Major Authors Online series produced by Primary Source Media, a company based in Orange, Conn., that brings original materials of scholarly interest into the electronic domain. Choice magazine, a publication of the American Library Association, reviews books and other academic projects for reference and college libraries.

“The award is of some significance, because it is not given to many digital products,” said Frank Menchaca, editorial director of Primary Source Media.

The Cervantes CD contains critical editions of all of the author’s work-most notably his best known, “Don Quixote”– in the original Spanish as well as the most widely used English translations. The works are presented in their first edition, linked, page by page, to facsimile images.

A classic Spanish reference work dating from 1611, “Tesoro de la lengua castellana,” in fully searchable e-text and facsimile and over 100 illustrations of “Don Quixote” across cultures and throughout four centuries are among the outstanding features of this encyclopedic CD.

Gonzalez Echevarria provided introductions to the project as a whole and to its graphic material.

Gonzalez Echevarria is The Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale. He is the author of, among other books, “Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative,” which won awards from the Modern Language Association of America and the Latin American Studies Association, and most recently “The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball.” He is the chairman of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale.