Darwin Digital Library of Evolution

The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution is based at the American Museum of Natural History Library, and strives to make the full literature of evolution available online, with a focus on the work of Charles Robert Darwin. This project is currently considered a pilot program, and hopes to grow larger in the future. The website includes digitized manuscripts (which have been OCR'd), images of contextual information, and over 3,500 references in an electronic bibliography.

1) Selection Decisions
Versions of Darwin's theory from 1842, 1844, 1856-58, and 1859 have been made available through this website (whether from their own digitization or from pulling from other sites). It is stated that the library's intention is to digitize all of Darwin's work, as well as scientific evolutionary theory from the 17th century to the present. Darwin's 16 books and 150 article (in both principal English and foreign language editions), experimental records, close observations, and voluminous reading notes are all expected to be digitized. It is not stated if there are restrictions on what would be digitized within this broad category of material.

2) Object Characteristics
Darwin's manuscripts were scanned by the museum and OCR'd to allow the material to be searchable. Text was indexed to indicate original page numbers. Each document is listed, and a link to each chapter within the document is made available. A few texts are made available by other organizations. One of these documents is accessible through a flash player that allows the user to zoom in, but not to search through the document. The bibliography is listed as plain text on the website, and can be viewed in chronological or alphabetical order. The images are displayed as jpg images, and can only be viewed one at a time and one after the other (you can not skip around and view the images out of order).

3) Metadata
Citations are provided for the digitized books, which includes the publisher and the date of publish. Little descriptive information is provided for the images- only the donor name is listed and the name of the image. The photographer and the copyright owner are not provided. Structural metadata is provided for the OCR'd text, as you can see what page you are currently located on, and it is possible to jump from page to page by clicking on links available at the bottom of each page of text. On the flash player you can also jump backward and forward by page, but only one page at a time.

4) Intended Audience
The intended audience of this website are Darwin scholars and scientists looking to have access to all of Darwin's works. The goal of the site is to have all of the documents fully searchable, which would be a useful tool for scholars and researchers.