This project has been conceived in an attempt to share the Meisei's Shakespeare resources worldwide. Preservation of this cultural treasure and providing public access are not always complementary. However, the electronic digital technology offers the world one major solution. By utilizing this technology, we are pleased to offer the Meisei University Shakespeare Collection database (MUSC for short) to the public. The project started in 2002 and has been completed up to the end of The First Part of King Henry the Sixth of the Meisei Copy, one of the First Folios in the Shakespeare Collection. This effort was carried out together with Dr. Akihiro Yamada's transcript of the contemporary marginal annotations in the Meisei Copy.

Our database has since been gradually enlarged. It was enlarged to cover all the pages of the First Folio in 2003 and also all the pages of the Second Folio in 2005. Finally in 2006 it was enlarged to include all the four Shakespeare Folios. It then has been further expanded to include Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio, which has been widely acknowledged to have opened the way for the publication of the Shakespearean Folios.

The images of the folio pages up to the end of the Second Folio's The Merry Wives of Windsor here are prepared by photographs in 4x5-inch films and then scanned digitally. There are other ways to prepare images but we have chosen this method in the hope that it will better contribute to recording and therefore preserving the present conditions of the copy by taking analogue pictures.

The images of the rest of the pages of the Second Folio and of all the pages of the Third Folio and the Fourth Folio are captured directly by a high-resolution digital camera.

This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Special Research in Subsidies for ordinary expenses of private schools from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science & Technology in 2002. The work concerning Ben Jonson's 1616 Folio in this database was supported in 2007 by KAKENHI (Grant-in-Aid for Publication of Scientific Research Results, 198013).