My Experience with ORLANDO
My first impression is that this is a very useful research tool. I like the idea of having a wide variety of authors over a vast time period all accessible through one search, while remaining within the topic. Being able to go from a general search with multiple pages of results to a more specific search with a single page of results is a definite asset – and having the case studies as example of how to do this was helpful. I would use ORLANDO in the preliminary stages of my research as it would be beneficial to gathering examples of instances supporting my topic. By this I mean if I was conducting research on the way women used literature to gain an income in the early 1900s, ORLANDO would supply me with an array of women into whom I could search further to form my body of research, using other sources that perhaps do not make the search so easy to turn up narrow results. A database using keyword searching such as ORLANDO is an invaluable tool for researchers in the humanities.
courtneyfinamore 
January 15th, 2013 at 10:39 AM
Courtney, Can you describe a particular search you tried?
January 16th, 2013 at 6:41 PM
The search that I tried was the one described in the third case study – women and money. This was a tag search using “wealth” as the sole tag, from the period AD 1890 to 1910-12-31, and I deselected male writers and other women writers as it explained to. This search returned 400 results on material generally related to women and wealth… Not very ideal if you are looking for sources on a specific topic! It then goes on to demonstrate ways to narrow your search. By adding additional tags, like writings and earnings, it is possible to bring the search results down to under 20 – all of which are specific enough to use for a research project.