Launching Later This Week: New York Public Library’s Shelley-Godwin Digital Archive

The site will go live this Thursday (October 31, 2013). Until then, you can learn more about the project here.
From NYPL:

The New York Public Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle is proud to announce the launch of the Shelley-Godwin Archive, a new digital resource that will comprise the manuscripts of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
For the first time ever, the widely scattered manuscripts of England’s “first family of writers” are being brought together in digital form online for worldwide use.
Information about the Shelley-Godwin Archive site can be viewed at shelleygodwinarchive.org
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“The Library is proud to announce the launch of the Shelley-Godwin Archive, an important digital resource that will enable scholars, students, and the general public to access, analyze and utilize priceless treasures from the world of literature,” said Mary Lee Kennedy, Chief Library Officer of The New York Public Library. “This project is a prime example of the Library’s continuing mission to make its collections as accessible as possible to the public for educational and scholarly purposes. We are very pleased to be partnering with such renowned institutions as The Bodleian and MITH on this exciting project.”
Created in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the MITH at the University of Maryland, the Shelley-Godwin Archive makes manuscripts and early editions of works by these four key writers of British Romantic literature freely available to the public online. They will enable scholars to study, annotate, and manipulate manuscripts in ways that they could never do with paper or single images. Bringing all four writers together, it will allow scholars to unite the critical, historical, and biographical strands of their research.
Most of the primary material in the Shelley-Godwin Archive is drawn from The NYPL’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle and the Bodleian’s Shelley holdings, the two foremost collections of these materials in the world. The Archive has been constructed from the start with future phases in mind, to enable a participatory platform for scholars, students and the general public to engage in the curation, annotation and encoding of these important manuscripts, bringing humanities research into the classroom and out to the public.
For more information you can visit shelleygodwinarchive.org and if you wish to be added to the mailing list for updates in coming months send your e-mail address to info@shelleygodwinarchive.org

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