At present, there is no catalogue, in print or online, covering in a comprehensive manner the textual iconography of the . Attempts were made in 1879 and 1895 to offer a representative sampling but the coverage is very limited in both cases, amounting in the former to 101 illustrations from 60 selected editions, and to 23 plates from a single edition in the latter. (Barcelona: P. Riera, 1879). (Madrid, 1905); (Madrid, 1946); Juan Givanel Mas, (Barcelona, 1944).

Two key obstacles have prevented the publication of a comprehensive collection or archive based on the textual iconography of the : 1) the rarity of and difficult access to the materials, and 2) the technical and financial difficulties in compiling and disseminating such an archive in print format. The advent of hypertext, digital libraries, and the Internet, among other technological factors of the information technology revolution, make the impossible dream of visualizing the a realizable goal. Nevertheless, there remain still considerable obstacles and challenges if the result is to be both effective and valuable as an educational tool and a research resource in the humanities.

In this context, the has under way the creation of a fully accessible, searchable and documented electronic database and digital archive of all the illustrations that form the textual iconography of the , as permitted by copyright limitations, along with the necessary interfaces and visualization tools to allow for the kind of access and study until now unavailable.The is an ongoing long-term project and research initiative dedicated to the development of a comprehensive digital archive based on the works of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the cornerstone of Hispanic letters and one of the world's most influential authors. In partnership with the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries and the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, a division of the Texas A&M University Libraries, our goal is to create an online repository of textual, documentary, bibliographic, and visual electronic resources to serve the needs of students and scholars interested in Cervantes' life, times and work, and focused in particular on the study of (). We further envision the archive as a research depository to complement the textual and bibliographical electronic resources already present in the , as well as a unique digital variorum image collection able to extend the value of our , initiated in 1999. The archive will allow worldwide electronic access to these unique and rare textual and graphic resources by scholars, students, and users interested in Cervantes' work and the influence of his masterpiece through 400 years from several perspectives: textual, artistic, critical, bibliographical, and historical.

In the last few years, critical interest on the illustrations of the has been renewed as demonstrated by the publication of three major monographs by J. Hartau, R. Paulson, and R. Schmidt.Johannes Hartau, (Berlin: Mann, 1987); Ronald Paulson, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1998); Rachel Schmidt, (Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP, 1999). Of equal significance is the recent exhibition at the Museo del Prado in Madrid entitled , as well as the richly illustrated and documented catalogue of the exhibition prepared under the direction of Patrick Lenaghan, Curator of prints at the Hispanic Society of America in New York.Patrick Lenaghan, together with Javier Blas y José Manuel Matilla, (Madrid: Hispanic Society of America-Museo Nacional del Prado-Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Calcografía Nacional, 2003). See also the catalogue prepared for another related exhibition, (Madrid: Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte-Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 2003), which visited Texas A&M University in March-April 2004 during the celebration of Spain Week. These studies and events place the illustrations in new and diverse cultural, aesthetic and historical contexts, demonstrating their key critical value and role in the reception and interpretation of the novel, and make evident the urgent need to provide a more complete and accessible resource to the rich artistic tradition of the textual iconography of the in order to better understand its significant contribution to the editorial history and critical reception of Cervantes' novel still largely unknown to readers and unexamined by critics.

The main rare book collection supporting our project is the Collection at the Cushing Memorial Library and Archives of Texas A&M University. In recent years, the and the Cushing Memorial Library have acquired a large number of significant illustrated editions for the purpose of creating a special collection of illustrated editions of the . At present (November 2004) the textual iconography collection includes 352 editions, published since 1620. The collection comprises over 650 volumes and is concentrated in 18th and 19th century English, French, and Spanish illustrated editions. We estimate the digital archive of the collection will eventually include upwards of 8,000 images and a fully searchable database complemented by innovative visualization tools.Carlos Monroy et al. . . John Frow, ed. University of Edinburgh: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2003. .

An important component of our initial work is the specification of a comprehensive taxonomy of the episodes, adventures, themes and characters in the . The taxonomy, representing the logical narrative structure of the work, will provide the addressing mechanism by which illustrations, texts, and other components can be associated with one another automatically. Through manipulation of the structure of the taxonomic elements and through specification of the desired interrelationships, hypotheses about the work can be posed and examined through coordinated inspection of text, illustration, commentary, and bibliography.

Specifically for the , an XML schema, compatible with the TEI DTD, is being created representing the complex and highly significant interrelationships of episodes and adventures traceable throughout the entire text of as identified and tagged in our narrative taxonomy. In the first phase of the textual iconography project, one base text of the is being fully encoded in TEI XML. Given the bilingual nature of our site and the international scope of its users, we next plan to encode J. Ormsby's English translation, already available in our digital library of electronic texts. Since this mark-up will include elements created by project staff to represent the various episodes, adventures, themes and motifs present in the narrative, these texts will provide an even richer searching opportunity for Cervantes scholars and will allow the subsequent incorporation of other key critical/textual editions.

The project represents a close collaboration among four administrative groups on the Texas A&M University campus-Cervantes scholars based in the Hispanic Studies Department, professional staff members from the Texas A&M University Libraries, Information Science researchers from the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL), and digital imaging specialists from the Texas A&M University Digital Library (TAMUDL), as diagrammed in Figure 1. Three separate representations of the collection are maintained at present-an edition master list (maintained in Hispanic Studies), a production collection (maintained in the A&M Libraries), and a research collection (maintained in the CSDL). The edition master list (Figure 2) serves as a master index and is imported by the two collections. As editions are digitized, the collected images are distributed simultaneously to both collections. The production collection maintains a set of Dublin-core-based metadata records, which are kept for each edition (Figure 3) and for each image of interest within each image (Figure 4). These metadata fields initially are populated from the master list and are augmented with additional information as the edition is catalogued, imaged, and associated with the comprehensive taxonomy. The research collection currently provides a Web-based "proofing" interface (illustrated in Figure 5 and accessible from our Web pages at ) for the purpose of allowing quick browsing and searching of the growing collection.

At the time of writing, the project has been ongoing for about a year and a half. The first year's activities focused on defining the metadata fields and imaging standards. The TAMUDL's imaging work began with test scans in Fall 2003, and currently is reaching production levels. To date, 32 editions have been imaged locally and another 15 obtained from other sources (the Library of Congress and the Spanish National Library), with a total of 1659 images currently available.

The added value of the illustrations in the textual iconography digital archive derive in particular from their innovative treatment and relationship with the collection of electronic text available already at the and in the linkages allowing connectivity between images, metadata, and bibliography entries. In addition, the archive provides interactivity between digital images and electronic texts, from different entry points. For example, one can browse single images, images with same metadata in a given field (content), sequential images from same edition, or all images related to a particular chapter or adventure by same artist or in the same edition. We also plan to develop a tool to compare, juxtapose and collage related images from several editions, artists, etc., as part of our research to create new approaches and techniques to display images for analysis, beyond browsing and searching; in that connection we will expand archival description methods, and advance ways in which to integrate texts and images with metadata, as previously done for the images included in the electronic variorum edition of the .

The digital images, electronic databases, hypertextual archive, and visualizations tools to be created will be fully accessible free of charge through customized interfaces at the Internet portal of the , as well as, in Spanish, through the portals of the National Library of Spain and the University of Castilla-La Mancha. The wide interdisciplinary interest in the throughout the centuries, its canonical and seminal status in the creation of the novel as a genre, its traditional inclusion in world literature courses, and its iconic status in Hispanic culture, are all factors insuring that the potential audience for the reference materials to be made available by our proposed project will be large, constant, and varied. It will include scholars in literary and book history interested in evaluating the reception and development of the written and visual text, students of the novel and of illustrations researching the role and function of iconography in narrative, and curious readers interested in seeing and appreciating for the first time a rich artistic tradition.We provide a more complete acknowledgement of the many participants in this project at