A comparative review of The Carlyle Letters Online and The Jane Addams Digital Edition

The Carlyle Letters Online (CLO) and The Jane Addams Digital Edition (JADE) represent digital scholarly edition projects comparable in their scale (7 – 8,000 documents), their relationships with print editions projects, and their self-definition as a database. They differ remarkably in their methods of document curation, the organization of their contents, in their search functionality, in their publishing frameworks, and in their relationship to the semantic web. Comparing and contrasting CLO and JADE serves to highlight issues of design, navigation, and planning for large-scale digital scholarly editions designed to complement print editions. While JADE follows a metadata based, semantic web approach and depends heavily on Omeka, CLO chose a more classical TEI approach, which has very different consequences both for end users and long-term sustainability.