Oxford University's Bodleian Library has launched a public appeal to raise £20,000 ($31,200 Cdn) to make the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays available online.

The Bodleian owns a First Folio, a bound copy of a collection of Shakespeare's plays still in its original leather cover. IT was published in 1623, just a few years after the Bard’s death in 1616.

Assembled by Shakespeare’s friends and fellow actors, the First Folio is the reason plays such as The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Julius Caesar have survived. It has long been considered an authoritative source for interpreting his work, but has only been made available to scholars on a limited basis because of its fragile condition.

The Bodleian received a copy of the 1,000-page folio from the the Stationer's Company, which printed it in 1623. The volume left the library in 1660 and was reclaimed in 1906, following a public fundraising campaign.

Theatre director Peter Hall of the Royal Shakespeare Company and actors Stephen Fry and Vanessa Redgrave are among those advocating the Bodleian’s campaign to digitize the Folio and other rare documents.

According to Hall, it is important to digitize such archival documents, so that they can be more easily seen by lovers of Shakespeare.

"It will provide an unrivalled opportunity for textual study not only for actors, directors and other theatre practitioners and their academic colleagues, but also for audiences whose love of the plays has remained undiminished over the centuries," he said in a statement from the library.

Several copies of Shakespeare's First Folio have survived over the years. They sell for upwards of $4 million at auction. The Bodleian claims that its copy of the Folio shows the tastes of early readers, as many hands have worn down the pages of Romeo and Juliet almost to shreds, while leaving King John virtually pristine.

Any money collected beyond the initial £20,000 will be used to digitize other works from the Bodleian’s collection, the library said.

The British Library already has placed most of its collection of early and rare works online.