The Complete Library of Charles Darwin published online

The Darwin Online project has launched a major addition begun in Cambridge 18 years ago which may interest some of you - The Complete Library of Charles Darwin.

The catalogue is a reconstruction of Darwin’s library as it was in his lifetime, hence not just recording extant books in institutional collections today (1,480 is the usual number, it turns out that many books have been overlooked). Combining these important works with hundreds of other titles derived from a huge array of sources- especially the work of many scholars, librarians and archivists and by including family catalogues to rare books sales from 1889 to the present and by including all print sources Darwin owned (not just bound ones) such as journals, pamphlets and clippings- we arrive at a collection of 7,400 titles across 13,000 volumes/items. Hundreds of these were not known to scholars before.

(The project enlarged the catalogue of books known to be on HMS Beagle and digitized that library in its entirety in 2014.)

After combining and collating many sources and identifying thousands of incomplete references, we have also assembled 9,500 links to electronic copies of the works. Of these, 5,035 are items within Darwin Online (850 are fully transcribed) and 4,500 are links to freely accessible internet copies.

Thus the Darwin Library is now integrated with his entire corpus of published works, his manuscripts and private papers, the Beagle library, and the database with complete bibliographical records of his publications in 56 languages and union catalogue of his manuscripts across 80 institutions and collections.

An introduction to the reconstructed Darwin Library and link to the complete catalogue is here: http://darwin-online.org.uk/EditorialIntroductions/vanWyhe_The_Complete_Library_of_Charles_Darwin.html