Emory University Library's electronic text center, known as the Beck Center for Electronic Collections and Services, holds a number of poetry collections that are served out on the web as separate databases. In order to span these collections of more than 200,000 poems we set out to develop a portal that would allow searching across several different databases. The portal provides students and faculty a tool for retrieving and reading individual poems for personal and classroom teaching and research. The portal was implemented using XML technology. This is a story of the development of the site, explaining why the project was conceived, and how the library, Information Technology Division and faculty collaborated to design and implement the portal. The web-interface design and technical architecture will also be described. Since 1995 the Beck Center has built a collection of texts that are tagged in SGML; many of these texts are poetry databases. Both commercially and locally produced texts comprise the electronic poetry holdings of the Beck Center. The texts were served separately out in a number of discrete poetry databases, each with its own search interface. Emory's Irish Poets collection is one example of a locally produced digital collection. A portion of Emory's literary archives of Ireland's leading poets was digitized. The archives were developed over the course of the last twenty years, and includes worksheets of the poets affiliated with the Belfast Group-including Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, and Paul Muldoon. In addition to the substantial body of electronic texts that existed, campus-wide interest in poetry was building, demonstrated by the establishment of a Poetry Council which sponsors periodic poetry readings. These forces converged to raise questions about how to make the use of on-line poetry resources easier to access and more logical in organization and use. A group of people from the library and the Information Technology support group for faculty came together to plan for a poetry portal. The Beck Center provided data management. ITD provided analysis and programming support. An informal focus group of Emory faculty who teach poetry provided subject matter expertise. The Beck Center put forth the original vision of the project: to present poetry across multiple collections through a common web portal. A prototype of the portal was built as a proof of concept of the use of metadata and XML technology. It also served as the launching point for further design. The unifying element of the disparate collections is the metadata, which contains information that was deemed useful for cataloging, indexing, and referencing items. The portal was built entirely with open-source software, with the one exception of the search engine. The process of building the portal may be divided in to two sub-applications: data preparation and the web interface. Data preparation involved converting the source collections from SGML to XML. From the XML metadata was created using XSLT and SAX software. The metadata was stored in the Dublin Core format. The web interface for the poetry portal employs a suite of XML technologies. Specifically, Tomcat and Cocoon, from the Apache Software Foundation, serve up XML source files on the web. XSLT (XML Style Sheet Language Transformation) is used to transform XML to HTML. The prototype application was demonstrated to English faculty involved in teaching poetry. A blue-sky discussion of how a portal could be useful and interesting in teaching and research formed the basis of the application requirements. The interface provides browse and search capabilities. The collection may be browsed by author, title, first line, collection, or date. The user may search for poems, either by word used anywhere in the poem, by author, date or title. Either browsing or searching will take the user to a poem window or a series of poem windows. From a poem window the user may also search for other poems by the same author, other poems of the same date, other poems with the same title or other poems in the same volume or collection. The user may also execute a simple search in the Oxford English Dictionary from the poem window, and bring up results in another window. Additional features that we hope to implement include user-defined "poetry notebooks," which allow users to save links to particular poems or searches, a search history for registered users, and the ability to save searches. Some associated features that were not part of the XML search-retrieval programming also emerged as special projects. One such project would be to collect manuscript and published versions of certain poems of poets that were in their collections in various forms, and to present them for study. Another specialized application is to have poems accompanied by audio files so that students can hear the poems read aloud. For some of the poems in their Special Collections, tapes were available of poets reading their own work. Other possibilities exist for audio performance as well.