Darwin evolves on to the internet

In the first ever undertaking of its kind, the complete works of one of history’s greatest scientists are to be made available for free on the World Wide Web. The entire works of Charles Darwin - 50,000 pages of searchable text and 40,000 images of original publications – will be available at the click of a mouse.

The site, which will comprise the largest collection of Darwin's writings ever published, will be unveiled by the University of Cambridge on October 19. It is aimed at serious scholars, but can be used by anyone with a passing interest in Darwin.

One of the most exciting features is the availability of Darwin's work as mp3 files. Users will be able to download audio versions of works like the Origin Of Species on to a computer, allowing them to burn them on to CDs, or straight on to an iPod. The audio files were created using text-to-speech software.

"The idea is to make these important works as accessible as possible; some people can only get at Darwin that way," Dr John van Wyhe, the project's director, said. "It's also a new medium and there's no reason why, if you can search and read the text and look at images of the original, you shouldn't be able to download and listen to it as well."

The entire project was the vision of Dr van Wyhe, who has compiled materials from around the world over the course of four years.

It features many newly-transcribed or never-before-published manuscripts written by Darwin, including his field notebooks from his famous Beagle voyage and a new transcription of his 800-page diary from the same trip.

Dr van Wyhe was inspired to make all of Darwin's works accessible in one place when his own efforts to research the famous naturalist at a university library in Asia ran into trouble.

He was only able to find one of Darwin's books, and a web search proved almost as fruitless - turning up an incomplete set of electronic texts that were themselves missing large quantities of relevant information.

"For a scholar it was incredibly frustrating," Dr van Wyhe said. "What was needed was a comprehensive electronic collection of Darwin's writings, and I realised that since no-one had done it, I could create it myself."

Most editions are appearing online for the first time, including the first editions of the Journal Of Researches (1839), The Descent Of Man (1871), The Zoology Of The Voyage Of HMS Beagle (1838 - 43) and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin Of Species.

The website is also completely free to use. Most texts can be viewed either as colour originals or as fully-formatted electronic transcriptions, and the two versions can also be compared side-by-side. There are also German, Danish and Russian editions.

The site also includes the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest catalogue of Darwin's handwritten manuscripts. Users can also peruse more than 150 supplementary texts, ranging from reference works to contemporary reviews of Darwin's books, obituaries and recollections. There is a complete collection of published descriptions of Darwin's Beagle specimens and important related works for understanding Darwin and his times.

There is still plenty more to come, however. At the moment the site contains about 50% of the materials that will be provided by 2009. Forthcoming materials include images of the Darwin Archive at Cambridge University Library, further published editions and translations, more editorial introductions and notes and transcriptions of Darwin manuscripts and technical facilities for printing and larger images.