Charles Darwin’s notes scribbled on the pages as well as margins of his personal library are now available on line for users around the world.

The notes will allow users to know how Darwin used reading to advance science and also read the notes that influenced his manuscripts. Darwin had 1,480 books in his library, out of which 730 contain scrawled notes offering clues on The Origin Of Species.

The Cambridge University holds most of the collection belonging to Darwin. Anne Jarvis, librarian at Cambridge University said that his collections are among the most important and popular in the library.

The notes allow users to know which pages of the books were found to be relevant by him, sparked his thinking or simply put him off. The online information is indexed so the users can search for relevant topics and ideas.

The project to digitize the notes is a joint effort by Cambridge, the Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History, the Natural History Museum and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. The effort has been sponsored through a Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration Grant by the Joint Information Systems Committee and National Endowment of the Humanities.