My point is that digital editing can very easily conform to the status quo without properly exploring what it means truly to participate in the digital revolution.  To some extent, this is a necessary condition, a first step that helps to make the threateningly new as familiar and recognizable as possible; however, there is a danger in this skeuomorphic drag.   Not surprisingly, the most successful digital ventures in the humanities to date have been established in a way that asks nothing of its individual users:

• University Press and journal repositories: Project Muse and JSTOR, or efforts by various major presses (U of Chicago P, Cambridge UP, etc.) to digitize its production process, including the implementation of print-on-demand reprints.
•  Commercially driven Repositories: Chadwyck-Healey’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), not to mention projects like Google’s Library Digitization Project, iTunes’ expansion into lecture podcasting or coursecasting, and the Microsoft-backed Open Content Alliance. And let’s not forget commercial behemoths like Elsevier, SpringerLink, ProQuest, and so on.  
• Web-based Journals, like RoN and RaVoN.

NINES is an effort by British and American nineteenth-century scholars aimed at:

1. reclaiming our own knowledge production;
2. exploring the emergent interpretive and social acts made possible by new technologies, including full-text searching, faceted browsing (by genres, dates, etc.), game playing (through the use of IVANHOE), text collation and comparison (though the use of JUXTA), and user collection, annotation, sharing, and re-purposing through the use of COLLEX;
3. establishing “a coordinated network of peer-reviewed content and useful tools (both organizational and interpretive) for pedagogical and research materials developed by educators and scholars working in 19th-century British and American literary cultural studies” (NINES White Paper 3);
4. decentralizing “scholarly work, allowing individuals and groups to work and archive scholarly materials in their local ‘IT’ environments and at the same time integrate that work into a widely distributed network” (NINES White Paper 3) through the use of RDF (Resource Description Framework) metadata.
5. providing content for free (open content, open source), so as an alternative to current profit-oriented publication venues, a move that also allowed us fully to aggregate sites like The Blake Archive and The Rossetti Archive without paying prohibitive copyright fees.

NINES represents an effort also to help us all live together.  NINES currently aggregates 404,268 objects, drawn from a variety of sources.  A pie chart listing the breakdown of all objects in NINES (see figure on the left) illustrates that a large majority of our objects at the moment are MARC records from particular special collections across the country (the Bancroft, the Lilly, and UVA libraries).  If we take out all MARC records and also objects from the Victorian Studies bibliography (see figure on the right), one can see that the majority of research objects comes from "free culture" federated sites that have gone through peer review.  In addition, though, we have aggregated all the nineteenth-century articles archived by JSTOR and Project Muse (including full-text searching) as well as collections by commercial enterprises like ProQuest (again, with full-text search).  We're now in negotiation to aggregate yet more from ProQuest and Gale, which could quickly change the make-up of my pie chart to the right. 

If you are at a university that subscribes to these databases, the move from NINES to the requested resource is seamless.  If not, you hit a "roadblock" once you get to ProQuest, JSTOR, or Project Muse.  (One can also request that a NINES search only give you free-culture objects.)