This paper describes the creation of a new humanities digital library collection: 11,000,000 words and 10,000 images representing books, images, and maps on pre-twentieth century London and its environs. The London collection contained far more dense and precise information than the materials from the Greco-Roman world. The London collection thus allowed for exploration of new problems of data structure, manipulation, and visualization. This paper contrasts their model for how humanities digital libraries are best used with the assumptions that underlie many academic digital libraries on the one hand and more literary hypertexts on the other. Since encoding guidelines such as those from the TEI provide collection designers with far more options than any one project can realize, this paper describes which structures were used to organize the collection and why. Particular emphasis is on the importance of mining historical "authority lists" (encyclopedias, gazetteers, and so on) and then generating automatic "span-to-span" links within the collection. (Contains 35 references.) (Author/AEF)