Today's digital library applications still focus on serving up virtual pages for the reader: the metaphor of the book is so pervasive that we can barely see it. But going digital is not only about producing cheaper and more accessible simulations of printed or painted pages. Digital applications should enable us to do more with a text than simply read it from beginning to end, or attach annotations to it for others to read. The digital application can restore the fugitive multi-layered complexity of textual traditions instantiated in a fragmented way by individual physical copies of the traditional library; it can also reconstruct those witnesses as evidence in the analysis of underlying semiotic systems, for example in linguistic or stylistic terms. There is a world of difference between an "electronic library" and a "digital repository". In this talk I plan to explore that world.