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Since 1992, The MIT Shakespeare Project has been constructing electronic environments for teaching and research based on digital copies of primary documents in all media, including texts, high resolution page images of early editions, digital collections of art, illustration and stage photographs, and film and video adaptations. A collaborative venture between the Literature Section and the Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI) with funding from the Microsoft I-Campus Initiative, the project uses the latest technologies to:

• CREATE exemplary digital collections in all media by building alliances with libraries, publishers, and theatrical companies.

• DESIGN systems of access in which all materials are linked to the lines of text to which they are relevant and which are easily used at all levels -- from advanced scholars to university and high school students and the general "reader."

• DELIVER a variety of archival resources to users through special collections available at research libraries and partner universities, publications on CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, and the World Wide Web.

Because of the technical and institutional challenges involved in such a task, the project is also intended as a test-bed for the problems and challenges involved in creating multimedia archives of global scale. The project has pursued a number of strategies for creating more flexible modes of use in the classroom that would allow students to annotate, collaborate and create multimedia essays.