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 The $6,000 grant will pay for the
content-management software the Papers of Abraham Lincoln project
uses to track hundreds of thousands of documents, images and notes,
said Daniel Worthington, the project’s new director.
“The Papers of Abraham Lincoln entered a new era last year when it
launched a website giving the world unprecedented access to Lincoln
documents. The Abraham Lincoln Association played a pivotal role in
transforming our vision into reality, and we’re grateful their
support will continue,” Worthington said.
"The Abraham Lincoln Association has been a supporter of the Lincoln
Legal Papers and the Papers of Abraham Lincoln for more than three
decades," said ALA president Bob Willard. "We see the Papers as the
21st century effort to make the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln available
to the widest possible audience, just as ALA did with the
publication of the ‘Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln’ in the
1950s."
The goal of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln is to track down all
documents to or from Abraham Lincoln and make them available online,
complete with detailed notes explaining their historical
significance.
An earlier project, the Lincoln Legal Papers, proved this digital
approach could create a valuable resource and advance our
understanding of Lincoln. But the successor project, the Papers of
Abraham Lincoln, gathered documents for years without publishing.
After Alan Lowe became executive director of the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum in 2016, he overhauled the project
in conjunction with State Historian Samuel Wheeler, a member of the
ALPLM leadership team. They gathered advice from the nation’s top
experts and established new policies and procedures that put the
Papers on a productive path.
In April 2018, the Papers launched The Papers of Abraham Lincoln
Digital Library with every known Lincoln document from the first 33
years of his life, from birth to the end of his legislative career.
It provided instant access to 340 documents written by or to Lincoln
and 4,839 others that provide context on issues he faced as a lawyer
and legislator. New material has been added regularly since then.
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Later in the year, Daniel Worthington was named the project’s new
director. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois and has 23
years of experience in digital humanities. That includes 13 years as managing
editor of HarpWeek, which specialized in digitizing and publishing 19th-century
Civil War newspapers, and 10 years with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln, where he
has performed every stage of the project’s editorial work.
“Under Daniel, the Papers of Abraham Lincoln is back on track to
produce the most important new resource for Lincoln scholarship in decades,”
said Lowe, the library and museum’s executive director. “He is also building
bridges to similar projects so we can find new and better ways to share
historical information. We’re excited to see where it leads.”
The Papers is working with several partners, such as the Civil War Governors of
Kentucky Project and the Frederick Douglass Papers, to create a website devoted
to biographies of people from the Civil War era. It is also working with the
University of Virginia Center for Digital Editing on a grant to support
development of new tools to encourage the public to engage with historical
documents online.
The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is dedicated to telling the
story of America’s 16th president through old-fashioned scholarship and modern
technology. It also serves as the state historical library.
The library holds an unparalleled collection of Lincoln material, as well as
some 12 million items pertaining to other aspects of Illinois history. The
museum uses exhibits, eye-catching special effects and innovative story-telling
to educate and inspire visitors from around the world.
Learn more at
www.PresidentLincoln @illinois.gov
[Christopher Wills]
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