I discuss the skeuomorph’s relation to NINES and to digital scholarship generally in my 2006 article in Victorian Studies, “Addressed to the NINES.”  A skeuomorph is a concept borrowed from achaeological anthropology and used by N. Katherine Hayles to make sense of the persistence of old formal structures within new innovations: “A skeuomorph is a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time” (How We Became Posthuman 17).  Her example is the vinyl on the dashboard of her Toyota Camry, which has been formed to simulate stitching, though the effect is actually produced by an injection mold.  The skeuomorph calls into play “a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the process of displacing and finds the traditional more comfortable when it is presented in a context that reminds us we can escape from it into the new” (How We Became 17).  The language used to describe the computer and the Internet is rich with skeuomorphs: Web pages, bookmarks, scrolling, desktops, windows, portals, folders, files, documents, trash. 

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.)

Our decentralized, open-source, open-access, and non-profit approach to scholarly publication has allowed us to be as flexible as possible.  We have already aggregated some of the best existing online archives, thus allowing users to make supremely precise searches across these previously unconnected resources.

New “free culture objects” will continue to be added to the site as they go through the traditional process of peer review by our editorial board (minimum of two reports by outside scholars).  NINES therefore provides born-digital Web resources with a peer-reviewed publication venue, counteracting the previous situation where sites existed as lone wolves in the World Wild Web, but we do this in a way that takes away no autonomy from site creators. 

The flexibility of our decentralized approach allows us also to enter into agreements with commercial entities like ProQuest since it is in the best interest of these entities to have the maximum number of nineteenth-century scholars directed to their sites.  This has also led to watershed agreements between NINES and both JSTOR and Project Muse.

This means that, right now, one can make searches across these journals and databases from within NINES, including full-text searching for all material aggregated from JSTOR, Project Muse, and ProQuest.  This is made possible by a NINES-tailored version of the SOLR search server.  Thanks to our use of faceted classification, one can constrain one’s searches in any way one wishes.  For example, if I enter “Byron” in my constraints, this list of journals immediately reflects the new constraint, showing how many articles in each journal make reference to Byron (see the screenshot on the left).  If I further constrain to “Byron” and “Eliot,” the list shows those journals in which the two terms are mentioned together either in a title, as faceted terms, or in the body of the text (compare the screen shot on the right).

And, of course, one can then see one’s search results, including snippets of relevant text. Folksonomy tagging allows the aggregated objects in NINES to be dynamic and largely user-driven.  That is, we are creating a social network that allows interpretation to re-enter the system as a social act.  Indeed, the most exciting new feature of COLLEX is the ability not only to COLLect but also to EXhibit (and thus repurpose) the objects in one’s “My NINES” collection, an ability that you are seeing in action right here.

So, how does all this impact university libraries?  For one, NINES represents a model for how libraries and scholars can work together to preserve our cultural and scholarly archives.  U of Virginia libraries and NINES are closely linked in a number of ways:

• the library provides NINES with space within its buildings; indeed, by providing space to various digital units (NINES, IATH, SpecLab, ARP, and the Electronic Text Center) , the libraries at UVA have become an important player in digital initiatives of various kinds.  
• UVA libraries also provide NINES with a cluster of six servers, thus providing us with the virtual machine behind COLLEX. 
• NINES has had a direct influence on university libraries: 1) COLLEX (with its use of SOLR and Ruby on Rails for faceted browsing) has helped to inspire and direct the creation of Blacklight, what UVA Libraries dubs in its "Virgo beta" form "a next generation search interface."  Stanford University Libraries have joined UVA Libraries in implementing the use of this open-source software as an interface for their collections; 2) Our former Project Manager, Bethany Nowviskie, is now Director of Digital Research and Scholarship at UVA libraries. 3) Andrew Stauffer, the director of NINES, is both on the university library committee and a member of UVA's SHANTI (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts Network of Technological Initiatives).