[PADG:963] LC National Digital Library Program announces Thomas Jefferson Papers final release

[Tamara Swora-Gober <tswo@xxxxxxx>]

This message is being widely posted
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The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the
Manuscript Division announce the second and final release of The Thomas
Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress on the American Memory
Collections Web site at:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mtjhtml/mtjhome.html

The first release in April 1999 included the first installment of Series
1, General Correspondence and Series 8, Virginia Records. This second
release completes presentation of all nine series of the Thomas
Jefferson Papers.  They now include approximately twenty-seven thousand
items organized into nine series with a total of 83,000 images.  Among
these series are General Correspondence, Commonplace Books, Account
Books, a "District of Columbia Miscellany" relating to the building and
design of the new federal city, and a Miscellaneous Volumes series.

General Correspondence, comprising almost two-thirds of the Papers,
includes letters, memoranda, notes, drafts of documents, small maps,
drawings, and designs. The Commonplace Books series consists of
Jefferson's legal and literary compilations. His legal commonplace book
includes extracts related to important legal cases and precedents that
served as a reference during his law practice.   Among the Miscellaneous
Volumes series are Jefferson's plantation and household accounts, his
Manual of Parliamentary Practice, and his "Life and Morals of Jesus of
Nazareth." Four years of accounts occupy part of a volume of Jefferson's
notes on legal cases heard in the Virginia General Court for the April
and October 1768 and April 1769 terms.  

Jefferson wrote in a small but very legible hand.  However, many of his
documents are characterized by bleed-through of text from the verso, and
his papers generally bear more than the usual marks of time, such as
damage from humidity, wear, and handling. In addition, Jefferson used a
letterpress to retain copies of outgoing correspondence.  These were
made by laying damp tissue against the ink side of a manuscript leaf and
then pressing the damp tissue down on a new leaf.  These copies have a
distinctive appearance. The pen strokes appear thicker and the blurred
appearance results from smudging that occurred during the letterpressing
process. To the extent possible, transcriptions for correspondence have
been provided from copyright-available editions of Jefferson's writings. 

Special Presentations
This release of The Thomas Jefferson Papers includes two new special
presentations.  The first is "Thomas Jefferson Time Line: Selected
Highlights," which provides a rich array of digital images with links
into the more detailed texts of the larger Time Line.  The second is
"The Jamestown Records of the Virginia Company of London: A
Conservator's Perspective," by Sylvia R. Albro and Holly H. Krueger,
Senior Paper Conservators at the Library of Congress. This essay tells
the remarkable story of how the Series 8, Virginia Records originally
collected by Jefferson for their historical importance were rescued from
disintegration. It reminds us that the online presentation of historical
documents is dependent on the vital work of physical conservation.

Digitizing the Microfilm
The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress is one of several
manuscript collections being digitized in their entirety from the vast
collection of microfilm produced by the Library of Congress
Photoduplication Service.  The Thomas Jefferson Papers was microfilmed
in 1974 as part of the Presidential Papers Project, instituted by
Congress in 1957.  The goal of this program was to process and microfilm
the presidential papers held by the Library of Congress.  The
sixty-five-reel Jefferson collection, captured on 35 millimeter roll
microfilm, was the final product of this program.  The microfilm
collection was scanned by Preservation Resources at their facility in
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1998 and early 1999.

Microfilm collections of historical documents present a number of
challenges to digitization.  There are problems of original document
condition, a wide range of tonal values, document sizes, and variable
document orientation on the microfilm.  For optimal capture of detail,
the Jefferson Papers microfilm was raster-scanned from a duplicate
negative microfilm copy.  The scanning negative was printed directly
from the master microfilm by Preservation Resources.

The digital images scanned from microfilm were produced in JPEG File
Interchange Format (JFIF), a compressed grayscale format often used in
digitizing historical manuscript documents because of its ability to
capture and display a wide range of tonal variations, from those in the
document paper to diverse qualities of pencil and ink.  This 8-bit
grayscale capture was also found to suppress the bleedthrough typical of
handwritten documents in the microfilm collection.  Grayscale GIF
(Graphics Interchange Format) images for access were also created by
Preservation Resources.

In the Thomas Jefferson Papers, microfilm frames of individual
manuscript leaves that were originally folded to make two to four pages
or writing surfaces, have not been split.  Large or oversized bound
volumes in Series 8, Virginia Records, were filmed with one page per
frame.  Smaller-sized volumes were often filmed in open book format with
two pages to a frame.  In the latter case, these frames were split
during digitization into single-page images to improve visual access. 
Among individual manuscripts, oversized documents have sometimes been
microfilmed in sections over two or more frames.  To increase
legibility, many of these separate images were stitched together
electronically by National Digital Library Program staff using Adobe
Photoshop.  Preservation Resources also used Photoshop to remove some
cosmetic defects inherent in the microfilm of all series in the Thomas
Jefferson Papers. 

The varying formats in the Jefferson Papers, which range from individual
manuscripts to commonplace books, account books, and other kinds of
manuscript volumes, received custom cropping.  Manuscript leaves or
bound volume pages containing text not oriented for reading in the
microfilm were re-oriented for reading as digital images.  Pages
containing multiple texts oriented in a variety of directions were left
in their original orientations.

Digitizing the Text 
The text transcriptions accompanying the images were converted at an
accuracy rate of 99.95 percent and encoded with Standard Generalized
Markup Language (SGML) according to the American Memory DTD.  The text
was translated with an OmniMark 5.1 program to HTML 3.2 for indexing and
viewing with Web browsers.  A unique identifier in the database record
for each document links the text to the corresponding manuscript images. 

Database Access 
Access to this collection is through search and browse pages that link
to a database created from the guide to the microfilm edition, Index to
the Thomas Jefferson Papers (Washington: Library of Congress, 1976), and
also through searchable text transcriptions for some of the Thomas
Jefferson correspondence and volumes.  Every record in the database
contains the name of the author of the document, the date, and a link to
the associated set of document images.  Other fields display the
recipient's name, brief explanatory notes, and a link to available
transcriptions. .

Please direct any questions about the final release of the Thomas
Jefferson Papers at

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/mtjhtml/mtjhome.html

to   ndlpcoll@xxxxxxx