An online guide to Walt Whitman's dispersed manuscripts

In November 2002, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the University of Nebraska‐Lincoln and the University of Virginia embarked on a project to create a unified finding aid to Walt Whitman manuscript collections held in many different institutions. By working collaboratively, the project team is developing a finding aid that is tailored to the needs of Whitman scholars while following a standard developed in the archival community, encoded archival description (EAD). XSLT stylesheets are used to harvest information from various repositories' finding aids and to create an integrated finding aid with links back to the original versions. Digital images of poetry manuscripts and descriptive information contribute to an ambitious thematic research collection. The authors describe the National Leadership Grant project, identify key technical issues being addressed, and discuss collaborative aspects of the project.