The Charles Darwin’s Library is an online collection of a portion of the books, manuscripts, and periodicals owned by Charles Darwin put together by the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Many of the digitized editions in the collection include Darwin’s annotations throughout his readings. The online library thus allows users to not only explore the books Darwin kept, but also in many cases his opinions on the subject matter giving insight into the mind of one of history’s most well-known scientists.
Sources: The main source for this collection comes from Cambridge University which holds a vast number of books from Darwin’s personal collection that were donated to the library by Darwin’s son Francis after his death. The online library includes digitized editions of texts owned by Darwin as well as a number of surrogates, books that are bibliographically identical to those he owned, digitized by the Natural History Museum.
Process: The collection is based around the digital edition copies created by Cambridge and the Natural History Museum, as well as numerous other sources. Throughout many of Darwin’s personal editions there are annotations and the website offers transcriptions of those comments and markings made by Darwin. They organized the collection so that you may look at the works alphabetically, either by the author or title, or chronologically in the year they were published.
Presented: Within this online reconstruction of Darwin’s works you can look through and interact with each work owned by Darwin that have been uploaded, flipping through as though you were actually reading the text. Once you’ve chosen a particular text to look at, they have organized it so that you may look through the text in its’ entirety or you have the option to skip through to the pages that Darwin annotated where you can view his handwritten comments on the page as well as the transcribed version to the side which also helps to locate any annotations by naming which line they can be found on or near. With each text there is also an option to download the material or the site offers a link to help you locate the book in a library near you.
The site also provides the option to narrow your search through the library by either searching for a specific text or for a particular phrase.
As a whole the overall look of the site is not particularly advanced or modern, but it functions well given its’ purpose and it is accessible to al manner of users. Since the Darwin’s collection is only a page in the BHL website you might accidentally click yourself out into the website’s main page, but returning to Charles Darwin’s Library is easily done.