0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 6/15)

We began work on developing the Founding Era collection by taking on the largest of the Founding Fathers’ editions, our own publication, The Papers of George Washington . At that time, it consisted of fifty-two published volumes, with over 11,000 pages in print. A new editor with an interest in digital publishing, Theodore Crackel, had recently joined the project as Editor-in-Chief and expressed considerable enthusiasm for developing a digital edition. He had previously been Director and Editor of Papers of the War Department, 1784-1800 , which was being prepared as a born-digital work. Another welcome development was that Mount Vernon made a gift to the UVa Press to support the creation of the Washington Papers digital edition, on the understanding that we would provide a free version through Mount Vernon and reserve some of the funds to complete the digital edition over time. The free version would contain full text of all the documents, but the complete scholarly edition with all the editorial annotations and indexing would be available only by license from Rotunda. The gift was especially welcome as the Mellon Foundation grant did not cover the substantial digitization costs, and we realized that the ongoing obligation to produce new volumes in both print and digital form would be a major responsibility for years to come.

The Rotunda staff worked closely with Ted Crackel and his digital edition team to develop and design The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition and to provide the features that scholars would find useful. The resulting edition can be browsed in two sequences, either following the print edition with its division into six series, or chronologically, with documents from the six series arranged in new juxtapositions by date. It can also be searched in a variety of ways. The introduction describes the process:

All text in the printed volumes was rekeyed using an industry-standard double-keyboarding process. The resulting transcriptions were tagged in XML according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (P5 revision). Tagging was used to capture both document structure and data categories such as author, recipient, date, manuscript type and location, document cross-references, and references to repositories and entries in the bibliographies.

Since the print edition of the Washington papers had been launched in 1969, volumes had been prepared by various editors, and there were some changes in editorial method over the course of nearly forty years. Each of the fifty-two volumes had its own separate index. Ted Crackel undertook to have his staff prepare a cumulative index, a major commitment of time. Although the digital edition includes many advanced search features, the cumulative index gives users the additional benefit of discovering documents through the lens of knowledge provided by generations of editors. In October 2006, the first iteration of Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (PGWDE) was unveiled at the opening of Mount Vernon’s new Ford Orientation Center and Donald W. Reynolds Museum and Education Center, followed in February 2007 by a licensed version published by UVa Press. In the two years since the meeting in New York with the FFP editors, the Washington Papers digital edition had gone from concept to reality and had been released in both free and licensed versions.