Eavan Boland
Poet
Eavan Boland is about to spring to life in a new incarnation - as a "cyberbard" on the Web. "Chadwick Healy, one of the biggest publishers on the Web, an academic publisher, have asked me to be the virtual poet-in-residence on their database," she says. Ms Boland is not joining in the debate over copyright as more and more literary works are cutand-pasted onto websites, with no compensation to the writers. "I think copyright is something that's going to be more and more creatively construed. It doesn't really damage anybody's copyright - there's a whole load of my stuff sitting round on the Web that I never authorised. I assume that it leads people to the work," she says.
"There are a number of very good sites, especially a site called www.poems.org, who run a very good daily poem. They had quite a bit of my stuff, and they had a whole load of other poets on it; they have something about the book, something about the poet, they link over to Amazon.com, the giant Web-based bookseller - it's a very good page."
Patrick MacEntee
Barrister
Patrick MacEntee uses the Web largely for checking the law in other jurisdictions, looking up the US Supreme Court or British law which might provide a precedent in Irish cases where the law has not come to bear on a case before. "For instance, you go to any of the search machines, put in Supreme Court of Canada, and up comes access to whatever material they have," he says. "You can also get it through universities. A lot of American universities have material from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court are very good about dispersing their material, making it available - so are the Canadians. They take the business of access seriously."
It's sometimes very important for Irish law, Mr MacEntee says. "Ireland is a very small jurisdiction - very small population and number of courts. A problem only comes before our courts if litigation has brought it up to appeal level," he says. "There are a lot of problems out there that our courts haven't dealt with, because the problem has never given rise to litigation, or appeals haven't been carried to final appeal courts. The chances are in bigger jurisdictions that a greater variety of problems get dealt with."
Paddy Breathnach
Film director
After his hit I Went Down, Paddy Breathnach has been using the Web as a search tool for his next film, which is set in Alabama. "I spent a lot of time looking up information about Alabama and the southern states of America, because one of the next things we're developing is a film set there. The last time I spent a long time on the Net I was trying to contact sheriffs in Alabama, in small towns.
"I'm a kind of novice on the Net, but I looked up law enforcement agencies in Alabama, and there was one sheriff's department that had a website. So I sent them an email and they put me in touch with somebody, and I took it from there."
Breathnach then flew to the States to meet the sheriffs he'd contacted with writer Conor McPherson and producer Rob Walpole.
Philip Casey
Novelist
Philip Casey, author of the award-winning The Fabulists, runs The Fabulists Homepage at http://www.iol.ie/ phcasey. The page has a growing section with biographies of Irish writers, plus excellent links to publications and homepages, and even useful software links.
"I've just finished a novel based in London in the 1950s, and I was doing things like looking up the Epson Derby winners at the time, and Cockney dialect, and the historical background." He used Web searches, with parameters like "Cockney" or "Winston Churchill". Casey is also trying to bring together an Encyclopaedia Hibernica online, linking thousands of Irish homepages to make a database of experience of Ireland. Taken together with Nua's collection of pages on different localities, he says, this will give a fairly comprehensive overview of Irish life.
Karina Butler
Consultant in Paediatrics
Dr Karina Butler of Our Lady's Hospital in Crumlin and Temple Street Hospital, and a world authority on childhood HIV, uses the Web's medical sites. "I have two main uses - one is to access medical information, which I do through a specific med information site, mainly Medline, and the second is for email," she says.
"Suppose I see a particular clinical situation that's maybe a little bit unusual or rare an entity, I'll often go and do a literature search on that, that evening. I'm able to do that through Medline, which taps into the NIH [National Institute for Health] library in Maryland in the USA, print out the abstracts directly from there, and then if I see something of interest, I can submit through the library here to pull the actual articles," she says.
Email is used for presenting patient-related issues to colleagues abroad for their assessment or help, or just additional information. In her area of expertise, HIV, "I'd be in regular contact with the baby groups in the UK and in France, both in terms of developing treatment protocols and, if there's a specific patient-related problem, that I can easily access other experts in the field to ask their opinion."
Wendy Hamilton
Business executive
Wendy Hamilton is vicepresident for strategy in northern European operations with Bowne Global Solutions. "Our favourite Web page - myself and my colleagues - is the Dilbert page (http:// www.unitedmedia.com/comics/ dilbert), where we go to get all our management tips," she jokes.
More seriously, Ms Hamilton says that the fact that all major companies now have a Web presence means employees, shareholders and anyone thinking of moving to work in a company can check their performance regularly.
Many of her staff have made screensavers of the stock performance of their share portfolios, she says, so the graph can be seen creeping up or down any time the computer screen is idle. "You can have automatic links so the Web site will come up when you're not using your screen, and show you how the share prices are tracking."
Lucille Redmond is at: lucred@indigo.ie