Three collections of high quality material of general interest and for researchers and  students of history, poetry, literature, science, have recently been made freely available online and are worth exploring.  

The First World War poetry digital archive and virtual trenches are the result of a JISC project. The resources include works by Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves and Vera Brittain and others, along with contextual primary source materials http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/enrichingdigi/ww1poetry

The virtual trenches are an exciting new venture in the 3D virtual world Second Life to simulate areas of the Western Front 1914-18. Explore the virtual Western Front in Second Life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Frideswide/219/199/646/

Shakespeare Quartos archive http://www.quartos.org  holds the complete digital collection of rare early editions of Hamlet. This JISC project will eventually reunite all seventy-five pre-1641 quarto editions of Shakespeare’s plays into a single online collection http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/jiscneh/shakespeare

Royal Society’s Trailblazing project is an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science http://trailblazing.royalsociety.org/ It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from their archives dating from 1665 to 2010. Scientific articles and commentary can be downloaded. Two examples are Edmund Halley’s article on the total eclipse of the sun in April 1715, and in 1788 Edward Jenner (of smallpox vaccination fame) wrote a paper on his observations of cuckoo chicks ejecting baby birds from the nest.