Introduction to the

Final Installment

of the Rossetti Archive

W E present here the fourth of four projected installments of the Rossetti Archive. The first installment (Spring 2000) centered in the 1870 volume of DGR's Poems and the pictorial materials most closely associated with that book. The second installment (Summer 2002) added to the first all the textual and pictorial materials that center in DGR's 1861 book of translations, The Early Italian Poets. The third installment (Summer 2005) focused on Rossetti's 1881 publications: Ballads and Sonnets and Poems. A New Edition and related material. The fourth and present installment (to be completed in December of 2007) will close production of the Rossetti Archive by bringing in all posthumous material and ensuring that all texts have been thoroughly proofed.

Throughout the development of the Archive, new images of Rossetti's art objects have become available and have been incorporated. Beginning with the third installment and continuing through Summer 2008, Rossetti Archive commentary is being updated and text transcriptions are being rigorously proofed. The third and fourth installments also play host to a new interface for pictures, texts, and commentaries, as part of a full-scale redesign of the Rossetti Archive. The Archive is partnering in a pilot aggregation of nineteenth-century resources, NINES. When this work is complete, an innovative set of collection and exhibit tools (Collex) will be integrated into the Archive. Collex will allow users to collect and annotate any digital object in the Archive, to share their collections, and to present peer-reviewed texts and images in easily customizable online exhibits.

Finally, this installment of the Rossetti Archive inaugurates a new search engine, based on the open-source Lucene platform, and takes fuller advantage of the conversion of our source files to XML. Questions or comments about the Archive's design should be directed to the NINES Project Manager.

T HE Rossetti Archive is optimized for web browsers that comply with current HTML and Cascading Stylesheet standards, as defined by the World Wide Web Consortium. In particular, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Opera fail correctly to render the multi-column layout implemented throughout the Exhibit and Object sections. We strongly encourage all users to adopt a compliant browser, such as Mozilla's Firefox, Camino, or Apple's Safari.

A LSO available are a credits page for the Rossetti Archive and a list of contributing institutions.