In spring 1988 the editors of the papers of George Washington, John
Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin were
approached by classics scholar David Packard on behalf of the Packard
Humanities Foundation with a proposal to produce a CD-ROM edition of the
complete papers of each of the Founding Fathers. This electronic edition
will supplement the published volumes, making the documents widely
available to students and researchers at reasonable cost. We estimate
that our CD-ROM edition of Washington's Papers will be substantially
completed within the next two years and ready for publication. Within
the next ten years or so, similar CD-ROM editions of the Franklin, Adams,
Jefferson, and Madison papers also will be available. At the Library of
Congress's session on technology, I would like to discuss not only the
experience of the Washington Papers in producing the CD-ROM edition, but
the impact technology has had on these major editorial projects.
Already, we are editing our volumes with an eye to the material that will
be readily available in the CD-ROM edition. The completed electronic
edition will provide immense possibilities for the searching of documents
for information in a way never possible before. The kind of technical
innovations that are currently available and on the drawing board will
soon revolutionize historical research and the production of historical
documents. Unfortunately, much of this new technology is not being used
in the planning stages of historical projects, simply because many
historians are aware only in the vaguest way of its existence. At least
two major new historical editing projects are considering microfilm
editions, simply because they are not aware of the possibilities of
electronic alternatives and the advantages of the new technology in terms
of flexibility and research potential compared to microfilm. In fact,
too many of us in history and literature are still at the stage of
struggling with our PCs. There are many historical editorial projects in
progress presently, and an equal number of literary projects. While the
two fields have somewhat different approaches to textual editing, there
are ways in which electronic technology can be of service to both.
Since few of the editors involved in the Founding Fathers CD-ROM editions
are technical experts in any sense, I hope to point out in my discussion
of our experience how many of these electronic innovations can be used
successfully by scholars who are novices in the world of new technology.
One of the major concerns of the sponsors of the multitude of new
scholarly editions is the limited audience reached by the published
volumes. Most of these editions are being published in small quantities
and the publishers' price for them puts them out of the reach not only of
individual scholars but of most public libraries and all but the largest
educational institutions. However, little attention is being given to
ways in which technology can bypass conventional publication to make
historical and literary documents more widely available.
What attracted us most to the CD-ROM edition of The Papers of George
Washington was the fact that David Packard's aim was to make a complete
edition of all of the 135,000 documents we have collected available in an
inexpensive format that would be placed in public libraries, small
colleges, and even high schools. This would provide an audience far
beyond our present 1,000-copy, $45 published edition. Since the CD-ROM
edition will carry none of the explanatory annotation that appears in the
published volumes, we also feel that the use of the CD-ROM will lead many
researchers to seek out the published volumes.
In addition to ignorance of new technical advances, I have found that too
many editors--and historians and literary scholars--are resistant and
even hostile to suggestions that electronic technology may enhance their
work. I intend to discuss some of the arguments traditionalists are
advancing to resist technology, ranging from distrust of the speed with
which it changes (we are already wondering what is out there that is
better than CD-ROM) to suspicion of the technical language used to
describe electronic developments.