The aim of this project, which commenced in September 2005, is to collect the complete poetical, musical and prose works of Thomas Moore (1779-1852) in the form of an electronic hypermedia archive, publishable in a pilot form on the World Wide Web at the end of three years. The archive will be similar in design to existing projects such as the Walt Whitman Archive (www.whitmanarchive.org) or the William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org).

Like a scholarly printed edition, the archive will establish reliable texts and annotation based on principles of sound scholarly editing, but unlike a print edition it will also provide a rich network of interconnected electronic materials: texts of the poetry and prose, digital music files that reproduce the musical accompaniments to Moore’s songs, image files of manuscripts and of illustrations that were published in various editions, portraits of Moore, commentary on Moore’s work and life, and a bibliography of Moore’s work and secondary criticism. Users of the archive will be able to gain rapid access to elements of Moore’s work at different levels of specificity. Full texts, particular lines or individual words can be easily retrieved according the needs of the student or scholar, and powerful searches and concordances can be conducted of a sort effectively impossible in the case of print editions. Visual and aural material hitherto difficult to access can be made easily available to users from almost anywhere in the world. Such research would enable closer study of Moore’s sources, influences and relationships to other writers, and would be a valuable teaching tool.

The use of hypermedia is particularly appropriate for the editing of Moore’s work, since a large part of his achievement and appeal lies in the performative, musical and oral dimensions of his work, all of which can be more effectively reproduced through the use of hypermedia than through printed media alone. Such an archive represents a type of ongoing edition, easily modified and updated. At the same time, readers, scholars and libraries will continue to need reliable and annotated printed versions of Moore’s texts, and for this reason, the materials assembled for the Thomas Moore Archive will be used eventually to produce printed scholarly editions of Moore’s work.

The site and its editions are currently in development, and will be hosted at www.thomasmoore.ie