My aim in this essay is to provide a categorical map to the landscape of digital resources available to enrich scholarship on Victorian literature and culture. But I also want to reflect for a moment on the general state of digital scholarly work within the larger institutional structures of our disciplines. For over a decade now, digital resources relevant to the study of nineteenth-century literature and culture have been proliferating, becoming part of the way we live now as scholars and teachers. Yet reviews of such resources in standard channels have thus far been rare.@For an example in our field, see John Walsh, “Multimedia and Multitasking: A Survey of Digital Resources for Nineteenth-Century Literary Studies,” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008); a version is available online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/. In addition, the Journal of Victorian Culture published several reviews of individual digital resources in a valuable special issue on digital scholarship in the 19th-century (13:1, Spring 2008). There are a number of reasons for this state of affairs, all related primarily to the fact that digital projects have developed outside of the well-settled infrastructure that has supported the academic book. This infrastructure is familiar to us, involving a network of institutions that includes publishers, libraries, scholarly societies, humanities departments and academic journals like Victorian Literature and Culture. The scene of production of digital scholarship is, by contrast, variable and dynamic, involving experimental platforms, emergent collaborations, competing standards, rapidly-evolving technologies, and unfamiliar genres. Perhaps most crucially, digital scholarly resources in our field have only recently (with the advent of NINES [http://nines.org] in 2005) begun to receive systematic peer-review, of which post-publication reviews in academic journals has been a part. Because digital projects are more process than finished product (i.e., they are never ‘done’ in the way a book is), they have tended to elude the reviewers. As a result of this unsettled environment, digital scholarship still abides in the shadows of the printed monographs, articles, and editions by which we have long measured achievement in the field.

The field is changing, however, as our collective relationship to the internet evolves. We are turning with greater frequency towards digitized texts –be they journal articles via JSTOR or books via Google – as our primary mode of engagement, and we are thus becoming both more fluent in the navigation of electronic information and more interested in shaping its representations. Furthermore, as we increasingly make use of born-digital resources– such as Wikipedia, email listservs, and blogs – we adapt our methods of professional information exchange in ways that suggest a larger migration of scholarly practice. In short, interest is growing in the translation of our work to digital format and platforms. Some of the affordances have long been apparent, including the power of electronic searching, visual display, and wide public access and interaction; but the institutional barriers, including those associated with funding and ongoing technical support, have kept the number of digital scholars relatively small. We are still waiting for an integrated professional structure that will nurture scholar-built digital projects and help them flourish in academic culture.

As a result, a large number of commercial providers have stepped in to provide the texts and resources that we want: Google Books is the biggest and most obvious of a list that includes JSTOR, Project Muse, ProQuest, EBSCO, Gale/Cengage, Intelex, Readex/Newsbank, Adam Matthew Digital, and the Alexander Street Press, as well as traditional publishers such as Cambridge University Press, which provides for the electronic distribution of this journal (via which you are most likely reading this essay). These entities for the most part serve digital versions of texts – both primary sources and secondary works of criticism – in return for subscription fees paid by college and university libraries; or they work directly with libraries, as is the case with Google, in order to gain access to the materials they want. The fees mean that ever-more-significant portions of library budgets are going towards the provision of digital access to information. The recent well-publicized resistance of the University of California’s faculty and libraries to price-hikes by the Nature Publishing Group is just one symptom of this tension.@Howard, Jennifer, “U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2010, accessed online: http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/65823/

Indeed, in ways that will have serious implications for our discipline, the university library system has entered a period of profound transition. As scholarly materials increasingly become available in digital formats, research libraries are reconfiguring their collections and services in response. Scholars want access to the latest online journals, the large commercial databases, and other forms of digital content. At the same time, libraries are expected to continue performing all of their traditional functions, including the acquisition and curation of paper-based material. Yet fewer people (especially among the student population) are using the print collections; and faced with financial pressures and the desire of constituencies for digital access to content, university libraries are now rethinking the place of the print collections in their overall missions. And they are also producing a variety of digital projects and resources to represent their collections, some of which are surveyed here.

Scholars whose work depends on nineteenth-century materials – which are often not rare enough to move into Special Collections and which are out of copyright and thus often readily available online via Google – will soon have to articulate the case for the preservation of those materials as part of library collections. Already many university libraries are downsizing, quietly deaccessioning multiple copies and moving large segments of the circulating collections into off-site storage. In this, they are driven by usage statistics, which suggest very strongly that fewer printed books and journals are being used; little-read Victorian publications are unlikely to remain in place as libraries contract. It may well be that the luxury of browsing open library stacks to survey the range of available publications (and finding the ideal book right next to the one you intended) will soon be out of reach at all but the most elite institutional libraries. In its place will be the network of digital surrogates available on your laptop or mobile device, which means that humanists and scholars of the book need to get involved with this migration – making nuanced cases about what forms of digital representation are needed, why and how print still matters, and what relationship critical inquiry has to the archive of study. That is, the scholar-driven creation of digital editions of historical materials is not merely an opportunity for showy graphics, or fast-paced processing, or hypertext links. Rather, it is an essential intervention in a process of cultural transformation that goes to the heart of our discipline and the historical foundations upon which it is based.

It is now apparent that our formal and informal scholarly communications are moving online at a rapid rate: despite a few holdouts in our field, the wide majority of our journals are now available via various digital vendors, and most of us choose to consult these versions even when printed copies are readily available. In addition, a growing number of universities are setting up open-access institutional repositories for faculty research – Harvard’s DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard; http://dash.harvard.edu/) has been an early model – meaning that an increasing number of articles will circulate via the web. The next step involves our monographs: the University Presses in general have been slow to move online, although the so-called ‘crisis in scholarly publishing’ has long been apparent and often lamented. Presses are shrinking their lists of academic titles, publishing fewer first books, turning down peer-reviewed work as insufficiently saleable, and even closing their doors altogether; yet the costs of retooling and the unknowns of web commerce have prevented most presses from making experiments. An exception is the University of Michigan Press, which is piloting a number of digital delivery formats, some of them open-access (http://www.press.umich.edu/digital/). Another significant initiative is the Open Humanities Press (http://openhumanitiespress.org/), which aims to publish new scholarly work openly on the web. The OHP is partnered with the University of Michigan’s Scholarly Publishing Office with the specific goal of publishing monographs. So, while it remains to be seen what specific platforms will sustain our work, we are in a period of transition. As the producers and consumers of literary scholarship, we all have a vested interest in determining the new models of its distribution and archiving. How can we help build a new infrastructure, one that would best support our needs? What initiatives and protocols should we support? How can we encourage more nuanced thinking about digital publication in the humanities? These are the questions that faculty and graduate students need to be asking, and working together to answer, or we will be done for – literally, others will do this for us, according to their own priorities.

To encourage the involvement of scholars in shaping their own digital future, and to support the work of scholars in the field, NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) was founded as a federation that would aid in the production, maintenance, use, and integration of digital resources in nineteenth-century studies. In addition, it aims to serve as an institutional representative for scholarly interests in the field as they relate to digital matters. We have lobbied commercial vendors to open up their data to scholars; we are working with presses to digitize and make freely available out-of-print but in-copyright monographs; we are hosting NEH summer institutes focused on peer-review and tenure-and-promotion issues associated with digital scholarship; we are collaborating with other groups to institute best practices and common protocols that will allow us all to share information; and we are developing specific software tools to encourage innovative scholarship online.

At the core of NINES is a group of sixteen scholar-built projects that have passed through our peer-review process and are now searchable together from a single portal. More projects are under development, and NINES will continue to support such work with its annual summer workshops that are meant to incubate high-quality digital scholarship while also furthering the theoretical, institutional, and practical conversations about the integration of that work into the academic mainstream. As a scholarly community gathered around materials of nineteenth-century literary culture, we all have a stake in the forms of research, publication, use, archiving, and professional credit that are taking shape in the digital environment. I think it is a mistake to label the following resources as “digital humanities” work; rather, they are the leading edge of a transformational wave. How we navigate those changes – how we surf -- depends on a broad-based conversation about values, practices, and goals that we all share as readers, students, professors, and custodians of the nineteenth-century archive.

The following digital projects (presented in alphabetical order) have been designed and created by Victorianists working in collaborative relationships of various kinds. They are essentially archival or editorial, in that they present sets of primary materials, scanned, marked and annotated for reference and engagement. One first notices how few of these exist, and how specialized are their subjects. A colleague recently expressed surprise that no comparable digital resources exist for a range of canonical figures, including Tennyson, the Brownings, Dickens, Eliot, the Brontes, and the rest; but they do not. Important work of editing and remediation remains to be done, and the scholars need to be involved. A “[9s]” annotation indicates that the project is part of the NINES federation.

At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901
http://www.victorianresearch/atcl

Troy Bassett launched this resource in 2007; it provides a searchable database of biographical and bibliographical data related to the Victorian novel. It currently records all known three-volume novels published during the period, along with significant information on serials; further expansions are in the works. As a database, it serves primarily a reference guide and bibliography, offering a well-organized and comprehensive set of information about the publishing of Victorian fiction.

Collective Biographies of Women [9s]
http://womensbios.lib.virginia.edu/

Created by Alison Booth at the University of Virginia, Collective Biographies of Women began as “an annotated bibliography of English-language books that collect three or more short biographies of women” published between 1830-1940, emerging from Booth’s book, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (Chicago, 2004). It has developed as an experimental biographical database; Booth is currently expanding the project to allow for nuanced meta-biographical analysis of narrative structures with social networks. Collective Biographies of Women provides a valuable window onto fascinating issues of gender and genre in the Victorian era, while leveraging the prosopographical (i.e., group-biographical) and database strengths of the digital environment to organize its growing body of material.

The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online
http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Directed by John van Whye and based primarily at the University of Cambridge, Darwin Online presents all of Darwin’s published work and a large selection of unpublished manuscripts and secondary material, including page images and electronic transcriptions (proofed and corrected by scholars). Extensive editorial introductions and annotations accompany the material, and detailed technical documentation is provided. This is a content-rich archival site built to a high standard of scholarship and usability (though not marked up in XML according to the standards of the Text Encoding Initiative, but in XHTML which may present sustainability problems over time).

Database of Mid-Victorian wood-engraved Illustration
http://www.dmvi.cf.ac.uk/

Directed by Julia Thomas at Cardiff University, the DMVI presents approximately 900 engravings from the Victorian press circa 1862, all organized in a database according to iconography as well as illustrator, author, engraver, source text, title, date, and genre. While somewhat limited in scope, the site can be seen as a model for larger projects that would organize and represent samples of Victorian visual and/or material culture. Browsing the iconography for topics such as “domestic objects > toys” or “weather > snow” (you pick your interest) is a great way to engage with the range of material presented here.

Garibaldi and the Risorgimento
http://dl.lib.brown.edu/garibaldi/

Based at Brown University as a collaboration between a team of scholars and librarians, this project centers around a huge “panoramic life” of Garibaldi created for display in 1862. Users can experience this vibrant exhibition, learn more about its contexts, and explore other 19th-century visual resources related to Garibaldi and his reception in the European press. The range here is of course quite narrow; but the project is an engaging example of Special Collections items being brought to life via digital technologies and scholarly attention.

Morris Online Edition [9s]
http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/

Under the general editorship of Florence Boos, the Morris Online Edition aims to present annotated versions of William Morris’s poetry and selected prose. Images of various editions of a growing library of Morris volumes are available – including the Kelmscott editions, of course -- along with some manuscripts, supplementary essays, biographical information, and other material. This site has a promising amount of content for the William Morris scholar, although its digital underpinnings and design seem in need of updating (and indeed, the site is not forthcoming about its technical standards).

Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition
http://www.ncse.ac.uk/index.html

A collaborative endeavor directed by Laurel Brake at Birkbeck, the NCSE presents six 19th-century periodicals as facsimile images with scanned, searchable text behind them. The chosen periodicals (including The Northern Star and The English Woman’s Journal) have a political slant to them, though of course they cover a wide range of topics. Images within the periodicals are sorted for searching by subject, and detailed metadata has been added to each periodical. Researchers can execute complex searches of the page images, although transcriptions are not provided. The NCSE is an admirable example of scholars working together to address the challenges of transforming complex 19th-century media objects into digital formats for investigation. It may well provide a model for others going forward.

The Old Bailey Online [9s]
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

Offering fully-searchable texts of almost 200,000 criminal trials held in London between 1674 and 1913, The Old Bailey Online is an ambitious, extremely valuable resource created primarily for historians. It presents page images and transcribed texts of the Old Bailey Proceedings, marked in various ways to make them more easily searchable. In addition, large amounts of contextual material, editorial commentary (including long articles on topics such as “Gender in the Proceedings”), and historical annotation are provided. Directed by Clive Emsley, Tim Hitchcock, and Robert Shoemaker, this project stands as a great example of the power of digital organization and searching of the historical record.

The Rossetti Archive [9s]
http://www.rossettiarchive.org/

One of the first online literary editions, the Rossetti Archive has long provided a model for other digital editors while also serving researchers as a complete and carefully edited representation of the complete works – verbal and pictorial – of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. All of the various editions, proofs, manuscripts, sketches, drawings, designs, and paintings are represented in full, along with extensive editorial commentaries and annotations by the project’s director, Jerome McGann. Begun in 1993 and essentially completed in 2008, the Rossetti Archive is surely the major Victorian literary edition currently online, and its development opened the way for a great deal of the digital humanities work that has followed. It remains an essential resource for scholars of Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

The Swinburne Project [9s]
http://swinburnearchive.indiana.edu/

Edited by John Walsh at Indiana University, the Swinburne Project offers the complete texts of an expanding library of Swinburne’s writings, all transcribed and encoded according to TEI standards. Walsh has made the decision not to include page images, and indeed the site is organized primarily by individual works than by published volumes. Walsh’s source texts are the 1904 Chatto and Windus and the Bonchurch editions, and while those have been carefully transcribed, we do not get much editorial intervention or reference to the original publication formats. Still, the Swinburne Project is technically sound and reliably transcribed, thus providing researchers with a searchable way into the body of Swinburne’s work.

The Victorian Web
http://www.victorianweb.org/

A large, group-sourced collection of Victorian material under the general direction of George Landow, the Victorian Web provides access to all sorts of primary and secondary material relevant to the study of the period. Original essays and web exhibits, digitized scholarly monographs, book reviews, bibliographies, and commentaries of various kinds jostle for attention in this linked web of resources. I have found the contents to be of uneven quality; and the site design and overall conception is creaky with age. Nevertheless, new material is being added regularly and there are things of value here. The Victorian Web may well continue to provide a point of entry for students and scholars.

As I discussed at the outset of this essay, libraries are undergoing major transformations as they engage with the wide-scale digitization of their contents. I am going to pass lightly over Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/), although from a certain vantage it is the most important resource available to the nineteenth-century scholar, by virtue of its sheer scope and availability. Its problems are, of course, major, and they include unreliable metadata, spotty coverage, poor images, and unreliable scanned transcriptions. Even with those limitations, my guess is that most readers of this journal use it almost daily, and have found their teaching and research aided in ways both trivial and profound thereby. This will undoubtedly continue, and the hope is that users will be able to improve the Google database by contributing corrections over time. Scholars should also be aware of the Hathi Trust (http://www.hathitrust.org/), a large consortium of university libraries dedicated to sharing their digitized content, including the Google scans of their materials and also material from individual institutions that may not find its way into Google. Eventually, they may serve as a university-sponsored alternative. Another related point of reference is the Open Library (http://openlibrary.org/), which is meant to be a crowd-sourced digital library that can expand indefinitely as people are willing to add data.

Although the general collections of university libraries are primarily being digitized by Google, most special collections departments are becoming active in presenting their own materials online. Some of this takes the form of online finding aids and small digital exhibitions; and I do not have the space to review all of this here. Instead, let me offer just two examples of discrete collections that have been put online by libraries for scholarly use. There are more out there – check your favorite library’s special collections page – and these will almost certainly continue to proliferate as resources allow.

Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature [9s]
http://web.uflib.ufl.edu/spec/baldwin/baldwin.html

The Baldwin Library of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida comprises over 100,000 volumes; 2500 of these (published between 1850 and 1900) have been digitized and made available for metadata searching and full-color page viewing from cover to cover. My favorite heartbreaking example is a copy of Gems of Poetry for Boys and Girls (1850), inscribed on the flyleaf, “Mary Eliza Coroday/ Died May 26, 1853. Now an angel.” This project provides a well-organized, valuable window onto an important collection of nineteenth-century material.

Leigh Hunt Online [9s]
http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu

The Leigh Hunt Online project, under the direction of Sid Huttner (Head of Special Collections at Iowa) began by digitizing the 1600 letters in the Brewer-Hunt collection at the University of Iowa, which are now available for viewing online; many have been transcribed by scholars, including volunteers who have used the site. As befits a library-driven project, the metadata is excellent and the site is extremely well-organized. Their goal in later phases is to bring together all the Hunt material from other libraries, so that what began as an institutionally-specific collection will ideally grow into a full-fledged archive. Leigh Hunt Online provides a wonderful model of a special collections library reaching out to a larger scholarly community and forging a valuable collaborative resource.

Like the libraries, the university presses are also beginning to make the transition to digital models, recognizing that their audiences want digital access to the content they serve. As with the special collections initiatives, the efforts of the presses are too various and changeable to map with any precision; I can only mention a few examples that seem particularly relevant. Rotunda at the University of Virginia Press is an all-digital imprint that has produced several online editions, including searchable versions of the previously-published Letters of Christina Rossetti (ed. Antony Harrison) and Letters of Matthew Arnold (ed. Cecil Lang), both aggregated by NINES. Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press are engaged in large-scale digitization of their backlists, building up Cambridge Collections and Oxford Scholarship Online for resale to libraries; other large presses may follow suit here, meaning that scholars will be asked to cede digital rights to the presses if they have not already done so. Awareness needs to be raised among the professoriate on this score, as we have in the past too readily given away our rights to our own work and might avoid making this mistake again. Open access should be the goal for scholarly communication, and some university presses have begun to recognize this as part of their mission in the academy. Ohio State University Press, for instance, has made a number of its titles available freely online, including Victorianist work by Richard Altick, Michael Hancher, Claude de L. Ryals, and Chris Vanden Bossche. Ideally, we will find ways to continue the trend towards open access for our work while also renovating the system of scholarly publishing by reconfiguring the responsibilities among the various participants in the chain.

In the spirit of open-access, several online journals have been launched to serve our field. Most print scholarly journals have gone digital by signing over their rights to JSTOR, Project Muse, EBSCO, and the like, where their content is repackaged and sold back to their institutions at ever-increasing prices. Of course, this has the advantage of removing any technical burdens from the editor, while also increasing readerships and revenues for the journals. Yet as technology advances and it becomes easier to mount content online, we may see journal editors making different sorts of decisions, turning for example to Open Journal Software to manage digital delivery. Meanwhile, we have born-digital journals like Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net [9s] (http://www.ron.umontreal.ca/), edited by Michael Eberle-Sinatra and Dino Felluga, which has published 55 issues since its founding in 1996 and continues to present some of the most exciting work in 19th-century studies. The journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century [9s] (http://www.19.), edited by Hilary Fraser and Carolyn Burdett at Birkbeck since 2005, is another important semi-annual online publication in our field, offering themed issues and high-quality, peer-reviewed articles along with book reviews. Also launched in 2005, Nineteenth Century Gender Studies (http://ncgsjournal.com/) edited by Stacey Floyd and Melissa Purdue, also presents excellent peer-reviewed scholarship and serves a valuable role in the ongoing conversation about gender issues in the Victorian era. NBOL-19 (http://www.nbol-19.org/) is a vibrant online review, dedicated to publishing reviews of books 90 days after they appear, and by inviting author’s responses within 30 days of the review. The aim is to leverage the digital environment to speed the slow-turning wheel of scholarly publication. Founded in 2008 by James Heffernan at Dartmouth, the site has already commissioned over 100 reviews and shows no sign of slackening its pace.

New digital surrogates of the historical record appear with some frequency from the various commercial providers that I mentioned at the outset. As of now, these are sold only to libraries, meaning that if you are not at an institution that subscribes, you have no real way to gain access to them (although many allow for a brief trial period on request). They are expensive, and thus difficult for many libraries to obtain; and they are of uneven quality, sometimes relying on scans of microfilm and badly-calibrated optical character recognition (OCR) protocols that produce error-strewn transcriptions. But, like Google books, they provide windows onto large-scale bodies of material, and thus offer to open up the nineteenth-century archive to powerful search and discovery. Indeed, along with Google Books, they are changing our standards for evidence and the protocols of literary research in profound ways that we are only beginning to register. Just a glance at the following list (itself not complete) gives you a sense of the immensity and range of material that these digital resources cover; there are perhaps 100 million digitized pages available here. Recognizing their value, NINES has formed relationships with some of the providers of these resources, whereby NINES users can search full text and get snippet results even without an institutional subscription.

I have mostly eschewed annotation: the product websites do a complete job of summarizing their features.

19th century British Library Newspapers (Gale/Cengage), 2.2 million pages
http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/19th-century-british-library-newspapers.aspx

19th-Century UK Periodicals: 1. New Readerships; 2. Empire (Gale/Cengage), 6 million pages when complete
http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/19th-century-uk-periodicals-parts-1-and-2.aspx

British Literary Manuscripts Online, c. 1660-1900 (Gale/Cengage), 400,000 manuscript pages
http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/literature/british-literary-manuscripts-online-c16601900.aspx

British Periodicals, 1681-1920 (ProQuest), 6.1 million pages
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/british_periodicals.shtml

C19: The Nineteenth-Century Index (ProQuest)
This product is essentially an aggregator for ProQuest’s wide range of digital resources relevant to nineteenth-century studies. These include the following, among others: The Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900, The American Periodicals Series, 1791-1919, Palmer’s Index to The Times, 1790-1905, and the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1801-1900.

http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/c19.shtml

Historical Newspapers, 1764-2008 (ProQuest), 25 million pages
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/pq-hist-news.shtml

The Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003 (Gale/Cengage), 260,000 pages
http://gale.cengage.co.uk/product-highlights/history/illustrated-london-news.aspx

Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1786-1900 (ProQuest) [9s], 250 titles
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/19th_century_fiction.shtml

Periodicals Archive Online, 1802-2002 (ProQuest), 14 million pages
http://www.proquest.com/en-US/catalogs/databases/detail/periodicals_archive.shtml

Victorian Manuscripts from the Berg Collection, New York Public Library (Adam Matthew Digital) [9s]
http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Literary-Manuscripts-Berg/Default.aspx

Victorian Popular Culture: A Portal (Adam Matthew Digital)
http://www.amdigital.co.uk/collections/Victorian-Popular-Culture/Default.aspx

I want to conclude with just a brief mention of several web-based platforms for professional information exchange and conversation. The largest and most influential of these in our field is surely the VICTORIA listserv, with its archive of messages growing behind it since its inception in 1993 and available on the web for searching (http://listserv.indiana.edu/archives/victoria.html). Daily exchanges of research interests, professional announcements, gossip, and sources take place in this active community, almost two thousand strong. The VICTORIA list is moderated by Patrick Leary, who also maintains The Victorian Research Web (http://www.victorianresearch.org/), with online guides to libraries, archives, and other information relevant to Victorian studies. Particularly notable is its inclusion of Rosemary T. VanArsdel’s ongoing valuable bibliography, Victorian Periodicals: Aids to Research (http://www.victorianresearch.org/periodicals.html). On another front, I hope useful to the community is The Hoarding (http://thehoarding.wordpress.com/), a blog I maintain that posts announcements of articles, books, conferences, and digital resources relevant to nineteenth-century literary studies. The North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA) has a blog of its own (http://navsa.blogspot.com/), maintained by Jason B. Jones, which also posts news and calls for papers in the field. Finally, the journal Victorian Studies publishes its Bibliography online (http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/v/victbib/). This project is managed by Ivan Kreilkamp and Andrew Miller and compiled by a host of volunteer researchers, who comb the scholarly prints for all items that bear upon the Victorian period. It is thus an extraordinarily comprehensive, searchable record of the ongoing conversations that shape the larger field in all of its variety.

I realize now that this essay could go on indefinitely: I have had nothing to say about general tools such as Zotero (a bibliography-builder) and Omeka (a web-exhibit creator, both developed by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University), and Juxta (a textual collator, developed by NINES), nor have I mentioned software with a pedagogical bent, such as Herbert Tucker’s For Better or Verse (a prosodic training tool). I have tried to keep my eye on strictly Victorian resources, but of course we are all magpies and may well find scholarly matter in a much wider range of places on the internet; I am sure readers will have other sites they use and recommend as crucial. Finally, it has been dawning on me as I write this essay that it is almost certainly already out of date, even if you are one of its first readers and surely if you are coming to it some years hence, in whatever format it is now being served. Take it for what it is, then: a partial view from the ground, of this time, of this place.