Chopin’s First Editions Online (CFEO) was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Resource Enhancement Programme) from March 2004 to August 2007. The project’s chief aim was to create an online resource uniting all of the first impressions of Chopin’s first editions in an unprecedented virtual collection, thereby providing direct access to musicians and musicologists to some of the most important primary source materials relevant to the composer’s music. The c. 5,500 digital images in the CFEO archive were obtained from five lead institutions (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Bodleian Library, British Library, Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina and the University of Chicago Library) and seventeen other libraries. The full score of each first impression appears along with commentary on particularly significant textual features. In addition, there are excerpts from the Annotated Catalogue of Chopin’s First Editions. Innovative methodologies for complex textual interlinking and web delivery of this material were devised using advanced imaging techniques allied with relevant open standards for metadata and interface design.
A revised version of the original CFEO website was developed in 2014–15 with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in connection with the Online Chopin Variorum Edition. CFEO is one of three projects featured in the Chopin Online resource.