0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 9/15)

The major outcome of the hearing was that the Committee on Appropriations directed the Archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, “to develop a comprehensive plan for the online electronic publication, within a reasonable timeframe, of the papers of the Founding Fathers.” Mr. Weinstein arranged meetings with the editors of the editions and separate meetings with Rotunda managers. Mark Saunders and I met with him and senior staff of NHPRC and NARA in March 2008 and again the following month when they visited Charlottesville. David Sewell demonstrated the Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, and we put forward several ideas to suggest how Rotunda’s work might be supported to allow the FFP editions to become free to end-users in a manner that would ensure that the use could be allowed under the terms of our agreements with other rights-holders. The final report, The Founders Online , published in April 2008, incorporates some of those ideas and is available online. (External Link) Rotunda’s work on the FFP is prominently mentioned. The report states:

In the course of preparing this plan, we focused on two options for providing online access to the complete Papers of the Founders in a timely fashion. The first option would be to have the Government scan the completed volumes and publish them online directly. The second option, which we recommend, is to help accelerate existing online publication efforts.

In May 2009, Kathleen Williams, who had been appointed executive director of NHPRC a year earlier, invited me and the Rotunda managers to make a presentation about Rotunda to the NHPRC Council members. By this time we were able to show the completed digital editions of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson.

The NHPRC, through a competitive bid process, then funded a pilot project to undertake part of the work anticipated in The Founders Online. This pilot project, now known as Founders Early Access, is an effort to create preliminary transcriptions of the still unpublished documents that are slated for publication in future volumes of the FFP editions and to put them online for the public. The work was awarded to Documents Compass, a unit with the Virginia Foundation of the Humanities at UVa Rotunda staff collaborated with Documents Compass to mount 5,000 documents prepared under this pilot on the Rotunda platform and to make them cross-searchable with the published editions already in Rotunda. The Founders Early Access portion of the site allows users to read, search, and browse the transcribed documents and is available at no cost to users. Founders Early Access was launched at the end of October 2009 with a press release from NHPRC. (External Link) There was considerable interest in this free resource, which was written up in a number of articles and blogs. The American Historical Association gave prominent mention of the effort as well as Rotunda’s other Founding Era publications on its website in December 2009. (External Link)

It remains to be seen how the NHPRC will fulfill the charge to provide all the papers of the Founding Fathers free online to the public. The National Archives now has a new Archivist, David Ferriero, confirmed in November 2009. Legislation (S. 3477) is in place directing the Archivist to “enter into a cooperative agreement to provide online access to the current and future published volumes of the founding fathers’ papers” and allowing him to use NHPRC funds for this purpose. In December 2009 Congress approved the 2010 budget for NHPRC, including $4.5 million to allow online access to the papers of the Founding Fathers. I hope by the time of the conference there will be more to report on the NHPRC’s effort to make the Founding Fathers’ Papers available free to the public.