This announcement invites scholars interested in Romantic and Victorian literature and poetry to help build an Internet-accessible electronic library of marked up and scholarly editions of books of poetry produced between 1780-1910.
The idea is to publish this Archive on the Internet and thus make the works freely available for study and classroom use. We are especially interested in works that have gone out of copyright, or copyright editions that an editor might wish to include in the Archive. (In the latter case, it would be up to the editor to secure permission to publish in this Archive, if such permission were needed.) Interested persons should see the "Guidelines for Submission".
The Archive's http address is: http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/britpo.html
What most sets this Archive apart, however, is (a) that it will be freely available to all, and immediately accessible; (b) that it will be able to include facsimile and other illustrative material in a hypertext structure; and (c) that the Archive's texts can grow over time (e.g., if someone has a note or other material to add to one of the Archive's works, it can be added). As to the last feature, additions would have to be made after consulting with the original editor(s), and then having the changes made on site by those managing the Archive. (A history of such changes will be provided.)
If scholars get their students to contribute to the Archive, the students will learn some extremely useful professional skills, they will have publications added to their records, and they will be making significant contributions to work in the field. Anyone can submit an edition to the Archive, however; indeed, all are encouraged to do so.
Some degree of editorial oversight will be provided here at the U. of Virginia. I will serve as general editor and UVA's Electronic Text Center will put up the texts through its World Wide Web server.
The Archive will be accessible through Web clients, from which texts can be downloaded as necessary. In some instances, copies of the texts marked up in SGML according to the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative will be available for use with the user's own text analysis software [forthcoming].
Anyone interested in participating in this project should contact:
Jerome McGann
Dept. of English, U. of Virginia
email: jjm2f@lizzie.engl.virginia.edu
David Seaman
Electronic Text Center
Alderman Library, U. of Virginia
email: etextcenter@virginia.edu