Walt Whitman's manuscripts as a whole are poorly understood and, curiously, the most important group of them, the poetry manuscripts, have never been collected and edited, despite his foundational role in American culture. Whitman's poetry manuscripts are found in approximately thirty different repositories, and the quality and depth of description varies across these repositories. Because the materials are dispersed and irregularly documented, scholars interested in the development of Whitman's poetry-through multiple drafts to finished work-cannot locate and examine the relevant documents without great expense of time and money. Our paper reports on our early successes and ongoing efforts to create a unified, item-level guide to all of Whitman's poetry manuscripts held in the US and the UK. Our work is an unprecedented use of Encoded Archival Description (EAD), a standard supported by the Society of American Archivists and the Library of Congress. The depth of our item-level description and our ability to pull together disparate collections to create a single virtual finding aid make this project distinctive. This guide, or Virtual Archive, will soon be incorporated into, and will be maintained by, the Walt Whitman Archive (http://www.whitmanarchive.org), an NEH-supported project organized and affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Technology at the University of Virginia (IATH). Thanks to a grant of $10,000 given to the Whitman project from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, we have established the framework for this project at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The Delmas Foundation funding has supported the development of an encoded finding aid to poetry manuscripts in the Charles Feinberg Collection of Walt Whitman at the Library of Congress. The next steps for our project will be, first, to link and coordinate our EAD finding aid to ones developed by the New York Public Library and Duke University, and, second, to collect, organize, and present records from various smaller institutions that currently have only paper-based or HTML records of their Whitman holdings. The Whitman Virtual Archive is conceived as an attempt to provide universal access from the collection to the item level for all Whitman manuscript resources distributed in over sixty repositories. It will provide a centralized online finding aid that will pull together and regularize information that now exists in these different institutions in partial and inconsistent forms, and it will provide a search interface adapted to the particular nature of the Whitman manuscripts and the special needs of their users. This work is crucial because Whitman frequently left his manuscripts untitled, and when he did title them, he often used a title different from that employed in any of the six distinct editions of Leaves of Grass. It is thus difficult for anyone but a specialist to correctly identify and categorize Whitman's manuscripts, a difficulty compounded by the fact that Whitman's poems sometimes began as prose jottings and only gradually evolved into verse. In such cases, specialists can help identify manuscripts that are in fact the working papers contributing to poems. That identification can, in turn, be encoded into the EAD finding aid, enriching access and understanding for a wide network of archivists, scholars, and students. Our project builds upon work done by the American Heritage Virtual Archive and the Research Libraries Group. One of the goals of the American Heritage Virtual Archive (funded by NEH) was to integrate "collections that have been dispersed among two or more institutions (such as the Mark Twain collections at Virginia and Berkeley)" and to experiment "with cooperatively creating a single finding aid, in which separate components are used to describe each of the separate collections held at separate repositories" (http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/amher/proj.html). However, because of its broad scope-American heritage materials of all sorts-the goal of creating a single, integrated finding aid was not reached. This remains an important research objective, and we believe that a project involving scholars with a focused interest in a more limited subject area (Whitman, rather than all of American Heritage) can attain it. For Whitman studies, what is needed is a single index in which one can find all the various manuscript drafts and notebook versions of any single poem. Our paper will detail the processes and struggles of creating such an index. From collecting finding aids and creating partnerships with other institutions, to developing a proper encoding standard and establishing good cross-department working relations, our project has embodied many of the benefits and challenges of integrating computing into the humanities. By identifying our procedures, and by laying out our future hurdles, we will contribute to a broader discussion of how scholars and archivists can collaborate effectively and of how the potential of EAD can be realized.