The Middle English Compendium offers easy access to and interconnectivity among three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary (MED), a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse based on the MED bibliographies, and a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. Each of these components can serve as an independent resource, complete with made-to-measure search mechanisms, but the power and potential of each are dramatically increased by their interconnection. The HyperBibliography plays a critical role in this inter-connectivity. Besides its function as a bibliographical resource, the HyperBibliography serves as a switching mechanism, enabling easy, swift, and precisely focused transitions by hypertext links from, for example, each citation in the electronic MED to the bibliographic entry for that text. A user in search of more context or additional data may then link directly from the Hyper-Bibliography entry to a searchable electronic version of the text itself, if one is available, or to the other resources that eventually will be linked to the HyperBibliography.
The letters M through T of the MED will be available online in mid-1998, together with completed entries (J-V) of the HyperBibliography and the Corpus of Middle English Verse and Prose. Further segments of the MED and Hyper-
Bibliography will be added to the Compendium as they are completed, as will additional texts and other associated electronic resources. Access to the Compendium will be free from July through October 1998, at which point access will be restricted to subscribers.