Meanwhile, the Rotunda team was also working on several publications for its Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture collection. (External Link) To date we have published six editions in this collection. Three are born-digital: Martha Nell Smith’s Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences , Christopher Mulvey’s edition of “Clotel” by William Wells Brown: An Electronic Scholarly Edition , Most of the developmental work on Clotel was done at the UVa Library’s E-Text Center before the UVa Press accepted it for publication. and John Bryant’s Herman Melville’s Typee: A Fluid Text Edition . Two are conversions of multi-volume collections of letters: The Letters of Matthew Arnold , edited by Cecil Y. Lang, and The Letters of Christina Rossetti , edited by Antony H. Harrison. The sixth work was a combination of existing text and new material: Journal of Emily Shore: Revised and Expanded , in which the editor, Barbara Gates, added transcriptions and images of some newly discovered manuscripts to her original print edition. All of these works exist as independent editions in the Nineteenth-Century collection and, since they had little in common, the Rotunda team did not do special programming to make them cross-searchable other than by keyword. Andrew Jewel of the University of Nebraska reviewed John Bryant’s project and “Clotel” in Resources for American Literary Study . Resources for American Literary Study, Vol. 31, 2006 (External Link) He wrote: “Each of these editions offers users access to a large number of pertinent textual sources, well-crafted and well-researched editorial apparatuses, and an interface design that is elegant and useful.” The review concludes with some thoughts on the potential vulnerability of digital projects and the new responsibility for continuing stewardship that publishers must assume for these editions.
In the second stage of Rotunda’s development, our business plan took a new turn. We realized that we would not be able to make a sustainable publishing program unless we could more quickly build a publication list for sale. The born-digital projects to which we had granted advance contracts were projected to take from two to six years to bring to completion after the Press awarded the contract. We had encouraged a number of future projects by giving letters of support to scholars who were applying for grant funding, but funding was not always awarded, or might be delayed to a later cycle. Most of these projects required years of editorial time to develop, and then at least a year working with the publisher after delivery of finished files.
After discussion with Rotunda’s advisory board, and at various meetings and academic conferences, we concluded that Rotunda was well positioned to take on the ambitious assignment of converting some of the major documentary editions of the Founding Era into digital form. We were already the publisher of two such editions: The Papers of George Washington and The Papers of James Madison . The Mellon Foundation awarded us a second grant in fall 2004 to allow us to publish newly digitized scholarly editions as well as to continue publishing original digital research. The grant gave us major support for staffing costs and some of the technical costs, but we needed to seek other funding for digitization costs, marketing costs, and other normal overhead costs. Again, the president’s office of the University of Virginia gave support to our undertaking. We therefore set out to prepare editions of our two major documentary editions and to discuss with other university presses and historical societies the possibility of licensing their related editions to include in Rotunda’s American Founding Era collection. We believed that we could create a sales base of important Founding Era editions that would allow us to continue to publish the more experimental work represented by originally digital projects and establish Rotunda as a viable publishing operation. We also welcomed the prospect of creating an integrated collection of historical documents that could be made cross-searchable, yielding new insights into the world of the early republic. John Kaminski, director of the Ratification of the Constitution Project, wrote in support of this plan: “The idea of having so many editions related to early American history, from the Revolution to the Constitution and beyond, in one place and searchable across projects is exciting.”