I haven’t had much time to read or write reviews this week. I’ve been busy creating a database of reviews for the Australian Women Writers Reading and Reviewing Challenge. This is to complement the new look AWW blog.

I’d have preferred to host the database and blog on the same site, but WordPress – for security reasons, they say – won’t allow me to use the necessary code.

What does the code do? Technically, when participants enter their review links in the Google form, it goes to a spreadsheet; the code enables the database to automatically read items from the sheet and upload these as entries – a kind of “reading list” – with links not only to the reviewers’ websites, but also to the World Catalog which shows library holdings around the world.

If that sounds like too much information, let me just say the new database will make it a whole lot better easier to find reviews than the Mr Linky boxes which the challenge started with this time last year. Special thanks is owed to digital librarian Jason Clark for writing the code.

You can take a look at the new database here. What do you think?