CRAVEN Museum's treasured and rare Shakespeare First Folio is now available online where it can be seen in a ground breaking project by researchers, students and enthusiasts around the world.

It is one of 54 digitalised First Folios from 30 institutions, including the British Library, King's College, Cambridge, The National Library, Scotland, and Boston Public Library, in the United States, to be included in the online collection.

To mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies - otherwise known as the First Folio - the website brings together dozens of digitised copies of the literary masterpiece where for the first time, people will be able to compare them, side by side, from the comfort of their own home.

AM’s Open Access collection, First Folios Compared, represents a major milestone in Shakespearean scholarship and cultural heritage and is being described as an unprecedented resource.

While Craven Museum's First Folio is on public display, most contributing copies have not been publicly available before, and several have been digitised specifically for the project.

Craven's copy, which was gifted to the museum in 1936, was originally thought to be a less rare and valuable Second Folio, and was only confirmed as a First Folio in 2002. It has had a chequered history and the condition of some pages suggest it spent some time without a binding.

Hosted on the AM Quartex platform, the free site presents a range of powerful new research opportunities for users. The gathering and unifying of a collected set of metadata tags unlocks unprecedented searchability functions, while a new split screen viewer enables side-by-side digital comparison of the unique texts for the first time.

As well as the stories told through the plays themselves, each copy offers up another narrative, depicting their unique journeys through history. Some are in prime condition, while others have received annotations, tears, or even lost pages. Many also bear printed differences – changes made by the printers as they produced each copy.

It is estimated that around 750 First Folios were printed in 1623, of which 233 are currently known to have survived worldwide. AM's new portal features 47 of them from 23 locations.

Claudine Nightingale, publisher, AM, said: "First Folios Compared represents a major milestone in Shakespearean scholarship and cultural heritage. By bringing together some of the world's surviving copies of the First Folio in a single Open Access platform, the project provides an unprecedented resource for researchers, students and Shakespearean enthusiasts around the world to explore and compare these unique and treasured publications."

View the collection at: firstfolios.com