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Vol. 26:1 ISSN 0160-8460 March 1998
Keeping Us All Up-to-Date
At its November 18, 1997, meeting, the Commission approved a recommendation from its Executive Committee to add an educational component to Commission meetings. This time would be used to keep Commissioners up-to-date on various projects being supported or address issues which have a bearing on Commission policy and procedures. The first such session, held during the February 24 meeting, was led by David Chesnutt, Editor of the Papers of Henry Laurens and Project Director of the Model Editions Partnership (MEP).
The MEP project, which involves seven editing projects currently supported with NHPRC funds, seeks to address the scholarly and technological issues involved in developing new approaches to enhance intellectual access to documentary editions by electronic means. It is doing this by creating prototypes for electronic historical editions which can serve as models for the editorial community. These prototypes are designed to demonstrate to the editorial community that electronic editions can measure up to the high standards of their book editions and that electronic editions can deliver information in ways which are simply not feasible in print editions. The project is helping to define the scholarly framework for tomorrow's historical editions by developing practical solutions for creating and delivering those editions, establishing models for delivery on the World Wide Web and CD-ROM, moving the editorial community into the mainstream of electronic text publication, and helping lay the foundation for enhanced use of historical editions.
The project has created a series of small prototype editions made up of documents from each of the participating editing projects. These editions make up a password-protected site on the World Wide Web which is being tested and updated with input from the editors involved in the project. The site is not available to the public during this testing phase.
Chesnutt demonstrated examples of working with both image editions and live-text editions. While both editions provide users with retrieval and search tools as well as supplementary contextual material, the difference between them is in how the historical documents are presented. Image editions present original documents as facsimiles, so that the experience is much like viewing the original manuscript. Live-text editions present transcriptions of original documents. The February 24 MEP demonstration used the Margaret Sanger Papers as an example. Facsimile documents are accompanied by explanatory text, including the names of individuals mentioned in the documents. Although the facsimiles themselves are not linked to further information, the accom-panying information is. This allows the user to access a biographical index with information about individuals mentioned in or related to the documents.
The next educational session will take place at the June 24 meeting of the Commission, and will review the results of the Historical Records Repository Survey recently conducted by the Council of State Historical Records Coordinators.
Archivist of the United States John W. Carlin, NHPRC's Chairperson, thanks David Chesnutt, Editor of the Papers of Henry Laurens and Project Director of the Model Editions Partnership, for his presentation, the first in the Commission's new effort to keep itself up-to-date on the projects it sponsors. Photograph by Earl McDonald, National Archives and Records Administration.
