http://www.victorianweb.org/

"The Victorian Web, which originated in hypermedia environments (Intermedia, Storyspace) that existed long before the World Wide Web, is one of the oldest academic and scholarly websites. It takes an approach that differs markedly from many Internet projects. Today the Internet offers many excellent resources — and we use them often! —  such as Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, the Library of Congress, and British Listed Buildings. These sites take the form of archives that quite properly preserve their information in the form of separate images or entire books accessible via search tools. The Victorian Web, in contrast, presents its images and documents, including entire books, as nodes in a network of complex connections. In other words, it emphasizes the link rather than the search tool (though it has one) and presents information linked to other information rather than atomized and isolated

"The Victorian Web takes a fundamentally different approach to finding and using information than do search-based Internet projects. Internet archives and invaluable Internet tools, such as Google, treat bodies of information as a chaotic swamp that one searches — one can’t say “negotiates” — with a wonderful laser-like tool that penetrates the fog and darkness. If we find what we're looking for, we leave immediately. We relate differently to hypertexts like the Victorian Web, which conceive of information existing within a complex ecology or set of connections, because they allow us to experience the richness of the texts and images we encounter. In the Victorian Web we encounter books, paintings, political events, and eminent and not-so-eminent Victorians in multiple contexts, which we can examine when and if we wish to do so. The Victorian Web also differs fundamentally from websites like Wikipedia and many reference works, such as Britannica, and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Each of these justly renowned sites (which authors of material on this site use frequently) aims to present a single authoritative view of its subject. In contrast, the multivocal Victorian Web encourages multiple points of view and debate, in part because matters of contemporary interest rarely generate general agreement.

"Originally begun back in 1987 as a means of helping scholars and students in see connections between different fields, the site today has greatly expanded the kinds of connections one can find. For example, on this site commentary on the works of Charles Dickens exists linked to his life and contemporary social and political history, drama, religion, book illustration, economics, and so forth. Similarly, our online edition of Ruskin’s enormously influential The Seven Lamps of Architecture, whose original print version makes its excellent illustrations hard to use, places these images near the text that mentions them, often adding details, photographs of the subjects of the drawings, and connections to a wide range of useful material including secondary materials, Ruskin’s other works, and images of the Gothic and the Gothic Revival.

How large is it?

"97,441 documents and images as of February 208, and it grows every day. Approximately 5,000 documents are Spanish translations of the sections on literature and religion created by a team based at the University of Computense Madrid and initially funded by the Spanish government. A small number of documents about Ruskin and gender matters exist in French translation, too.

How many people use it?

"The site now receives 1.5 million page views a month" (http://www.victorianweb.org/misc/vwintro.html).