0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 5/15)

Brief history of the founding fathers’ papers

Here some history of the Founding Era editions may be in order. There is a considerable number of important documentary editions of this era, all of which have been heavily supported by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), The NHPRC is a grant-making, statutory body within the National Archives and Records Administration that supports a wide range of activities to preserve, publish, and encourage the use of documentary sources. the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and private sources. Usually only six of the editions are recognized as official Founding Fathers’ Papers (FFP). These are the papers of the first four presidents—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—as well as those of Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. The papers consist of most of the known correspondence from and to these major figures along with related documents. In the early days of establishing these major projects several decades ago, it made sense for each to be set up as a separate editorial project at different universities. When the James Madison Papers editorial office moved from the University of Chicago to Virginia in the 1970s, the University of Virginia became the only university to host two of the Founding Fathers’ editorial projects. The UVa Press therefore now publishes the papers of both Washington and Madison (the first ten volumes of the Madison Papers were published by Chicago); Princeton publishes Jefferson; Yale publishes Franklin; Harvard publishes Adams; and Columbia published Hamilton (the only one of these multi-volume editions to have been completed so far). The editions have a long history dating back to 1943 when Julian P. Boyd launched editorial work on The Papers of Thomas Jefferson on the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth. Princeton University Press published the first volume of the Jefferson Papers in 1950 and by now has published thirty-four volumes in the original series and five volumes in a more recently established Retirement series. All these Founding Fathers’ editions have been published over a period of many years, and the work still to be done may stretch for a decade or more into the future, depending on the number of documents to be prepared for each edition. Since all these editions, except for the Hamilton papers, are still in process, a digital publisher has to be ready to add new volumes for many years to come and to support and update the technical infrastructure. (A much fuller history of the editions was prepared by the academic editors as testimony for a Senate hearing in February 2008). (External Link)

Stanley N. Katz of Princeton University, who among his many other responsibilities and distinctions is the director of a fundraising entity, Founding Fathers’ Inc., convened a meeting of the trustees and editors of the active FFP editions in New York in November 2004. He invited representatives from their publishers, the university presses of Harvard, Princeton, Virginia, and Yale, to discuss the prospects for creating electronic editions of the FFP. The agencies and foundations that have supported much of the editorial work on the FFP have long pressed the projects to develop materials for online delivery so that the general public could have ready access to as much of the work as possible. Each of the projects had a website with various major documents, but the decision about a full electronic edition would need to be made in collaboration with the publisher or rights holder, since the publication of a digital edition had implications for the continued publication of the print volumes. That New York meeting helped move forward Virginia’s plans for development of a platform that could accommodate electronic editions from all the publishers of the Founding Fathers’ Papers. At the time, Virginia was the only one of these presses that already had the technical infrastructure in place to undertake this ambitious project. After this meeting, the Massachusetts Historical Society, where the editorial project for the Adams Papers is housed, invited Mark Saunders, the new manager of Rotunda, to make a presentation to its staff. The Society had already made an application to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create an online edition of the Adams Papers to be mounted on the Society’s website. In Spring 2005, we held a conference in Charlottesville to bring together the editors and publishers of the FFP, as well as editors of some other scholarly editions, to survey the state of digital editions and to discuss how to create digital editions of ongoing projects without disrupting the editors’ work in researching and preparing new volumes. The director of the NHPRC, Max Evans, attended this conference with his colleague, Timothy Connelly, the director of publications.