[www.cambridge-news.co.uk]

IN A ROOM in India, two people sit carefully typing the same passage of text by Charles Darwin into a central computer.

Sophisticated software monitors their progress and, if either of them enters so much as a single letter or comma different to the other, they are met with a flashing warning sign.

This process is called Double Blind Key Transcription, and it's just one element of an ambitious Cambridge University project to the put the complete works of the father of evolutionary biology onto the internet.

This is no small task. As well as his famous books, the project aims to make available every article and unpublished manuscript by Darwin - along with thousands of articles about him - in digital form.
According to project director John van Whye, nothing is too insignificant for inclusion.

"We've got the notes he took before writing his books - or before he even thought about writing a book," he says.

"We've got his household accounts and his daily journals. We've even got pictures of the specimens he gathered during his voyage on The Beagle - leeches, flowers, leaves, sticks… things like that. "We're scanning in the actual specimens, actual dead things."