The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online

John van Wyhe, ed. The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online, 2006. <http://darwin-online.org.uk/>.

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online is a truly comprehensive and ambitious resource whose current version was launched in 2006. It was developed from a pilot website, The Writings of Charles Darwin On The Web, which first went live in 2002. Created and directed by John van Wyhe, a historian of science and Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Biology and History at the National University of Singapore, Darwin Online aims to digitise all of Darwin's writings, along with relevant supplementary material. Unlike sites such as the Blake Archive or the Rossetti Archive, Darwin Online was not necessarily inspired by the particular editorial opportunities that the web offers over print publication, but rather its aim is to act as a central research resource for those with an interest in Charles Darwin and his work. To that end, the site contains previously unpublished documents, at least one exemplar of all known Darwin publications, and editions of some of his works accompanied by new introductions and annotations composed by scientists and textual scholars.

One of the major strengths of the site is its dedication to achieving completeness. Though it is already home to a staggering mass of material, a regularly-updated "What's New" page alerts users to recent additions, while another page lists forthcoming works. The main contents of the site are listed under the general headings of "Publications" and "Manuscripts", each of which leads to an extremely long list of documents which might benefit from some re-organisation. For the general reader, there is a "Major Works" page which offers more direct access to Darwin's betterknown writings, though there is no link to this list from the homepage of the site. An alternative to browsing the "Publications" and "Manuscripts" is provided by a...