Mark Twain Project Online

Some key points about the MTPO are the following:

• Digital critical edition of all of Twain's writings with annotations
• In progress (only letters online now)
  
• Advanced searching within text
• Refine, sort, collect search results
• Browse options
• For each object: view edited texts, facsimiles, explanatory notes, textual apparatus, all in the same screen, using highlighted text to display associated information

Collection Principles
The MTPO is a continuation of the Mark Twain Project, which has been an ongoing effort to collect and edit Twain's works and papers since... Mark Twain was around, practically. The digital effort began with WordPerfect and PDF files, eventually moving to marking up editions with SGML, and then to the web medium. Even though the project has greatly evolved, today it has a clear goal of digitizing and publishing on the web all of Mark Twain's work according to its extensively-documented markup standards. In fact everything about the MTPO is extensively documented: from its Guide to Editorial Practice to the Technical Summary. The also explains why it has copyright and permission to reproduce Twain's work. I cannot find information about usage.

Object Characteristics
The Technical Summary provides much detail about the TEI standard used to markup the critical editions. It also provides information about how images are represented in the text, how images are scanned, encoding metadata, and search capabilities (SML, PDF, HTML, and plain text). When looking at each object, the number of cross-references and links is impressive. The amount of supplementary and supporting information for each letter is also impressive.

Metadata
Uses METS, MODS, NISO, and MADS. From the users' perspective, clicking on "Details" gives an ID, cue, writer, addressee, date, place of origin, repository, suggested citation, and status for each letter. Also, for each letter there is explanatory notes and textual commentary. Some letters have images associated with them that include a description, source, date, reproduction information, source location, etc.

Audience
The last two lines of The Making of Mark Twain Project Online make it pretty clear that the organizations involved want the MTPO to be a model for other digitization projects. So the audience is probably more than Mark Twain enthusiasts and scholars. The intended audience is probably other digital project leaders and people involved in creating open-source, standards-compliant digital projects.