Princeton University Press, the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and the University of Virginia Press announced Wednesday an agreement to create The Papers of Woodrow Wilson Digital Edition.
Edited by Arthur S. Link and published by Princeton University Press, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson will be digitized and made available online in UVaP’s Rotunda American History collection, with the permission of PUP and the generous support of friends of the WWPL.
“This partnership among two university presses and a presidential library harnesses the intellectual investment and publishing expertise represented in the great documentary editions of the last century,” said Peter Dougherty, Director of Princeton University Press, “and makes them more accessible and valuable through this century’s digital technologies.”
Princeton University Press published the print edition of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson, consisting of 69 volumes with a 5-part index, between 1966 and 1994. The edition’s editor, Arthur Stanley Link (1920–1998), Edwards Professor of History Emeritus at Princeton University, was widely considered a pioneer in the field of documentary editing as well as the foremost scholar of Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States.
The Link edition includes Wilson’s personal correspondence, academic works, and speeches, minutes of the Paris Peace Conference, and diary entries of close associates Edward House, Cary Grayson, and Josephus Daniels, totaling approximately 38,400 documents from a vast range of government and academic sources. The most significant sources of Wilson material in the published volumes are stored in the Library of Congress and Princeton University. The Journal of American History described the Papers of Woodrow Wilson as “an unprecedented illumination of Wilson’s activities and ideas.”
Woodrow Wilson is one of the most accessible presidents in American history due to the precise organization, annotation, and indexing of the Papers of Woodrow Wilson. The Rotunda digital edition will enhance discovery of Wilson’s papers by adapting the documents, annotation, and indexing created by Arthur Link and his fellow editors to a state-of-the-art electronic publishing platform. “Inclusion in Rotunda not only provides the most up-to-date digital publishing technology,” said Mark H. Saunders, Director of UVaP. “It puts the Wilson material in conversation with other important figures in American political history, from the Founding Fathers to participants in the civil rights and Vietnam eras. Comparing the view of Thomas Jefferson, Woodrow Wilson, and Lyndon Johnson on a subject such as race or presidential power can provide new scholarly insights that were hard to imagine in an age of analog information or siloed digital repositories.”
The WWPL anticipates digitizing further materials in its collection and the collection of the Library of Congress, including a selection of Wilson’s correspondence during World War I and documents from Wilson’s later public career, and making them available in the coming years. “There is a vast array of important Wilson material that could not be included due to the constraints of a print edition,” said Don W. Wilson, President of WWPL Foundation. “Those documents will now be made available to scholars, students, and the interested public.” Additional collections held at Princeton University, among them letters between Woodrow Wilson and his wives, Edith and Ellen, and his daughter Jessie Sayre, would also be added to the PWWDE.
Support AFP
Share
Chris Graham
