The assignment for school last week was to find and review four digital repositories. Each review could be no more than 200 words. I won’t inflict all my repository reviews on you, but this one and another I will probably post tomorrow may be of interest to some of you. So here, in exactly 200 words, is my review of the Walt Whitman Archive.

Begun in 1995, the Walt Whitman Archive intends to collect as much Whitman material in one place as possible for use in research and teaching for scholars, students and general readers. Originating at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, the archive now resides at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. Funding for the archive and its projects comes from partnerships with academic and special libraries and grants. The archive pursues best practices for the use and implementation of Encoded Archival Description to better facilitate the needs of users. The Whitman archive contains both facsimile and e-text versions of all editions of Leaves of Grass, an extended hyperlinked biography to which additional links are added as more material becomes available, all known photographs of Whitman, contemporary reviews of Whitman’s work, notebooks, correspondence, essays, articles and a sound recording. The archive interface is clean and well organized, easy to browse and search. Various versions of an item are presented together for easy comparison and links to other relevant information are also provided. The Walt Whitman Archive is a comprehensive, well-designed site that sets an excellent example for what digital archives can be.