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The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, together with the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, is to create the Shakespeare Quartos Archive, a freely-accessible digital collection.  The quartos are the earliest printed editions of the Shakespeare’s plays and are the closest to what he actually wrote still in existence.
 
News of the initiative, one of five transatlantic digitization collaborations between British and American institutions, can be found at the Bodleian Library website.  Funded by JISC (for British institutions) and NEH (for American institutions), the project’s other participating organizations include the British Library, Edinburgh University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.
 
All seventy-five pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays will be part of a single online collection.  The website will feature high-resolution reproductions and the full-text of surviving Shakespeare quartos in an interactive interface.  The ability to overlay text images, compare images side-by-side, search full-text, and mark and tag text images with user annotations will facilitate scholarly research, performance studies, and new pedagogical applications.

The quartos are of particular interest to scholars, teachers, editors, and theatre directors.  They have not been readily available to study due to their rarity and fragility.  The Shakespeare Quartos Archive will make these earliest quartos freely accessible for in-depth study to Shakespeare students across the globe.  [via LISNews]