When she was first lady, Dolley Madison was one of the most prolific letter writers of the early 19th century, and her correspondence has been stored at the University of Virginia since the 1950s. Now, to help researchers and students sort through the collection, the University of Virginia Press has compiled more than 700 of her letters in The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, an online product that went live last month.
Mark Saunders, electronic imprint manager for UVP, said the amount of Madison material made her collection, consisting of original texts and copies, the ideal candidate to be the first product launched under the press's new Rotunda brand, which will feature an assortment of primary documents published in digital collections. All projects released under the Rotunda project will be based on an XML content server developed by the Mark Logic Corp. Saunders said that while it costs more to produce materials in XML than the standard PDF format, "the extra investment is worth it because of the depth and quality of the [search] results." In addition to providing searches that can be conducted by period, correspondent, topic or place, Saunders said he was impressed with XML's linking capability, which lets users crosslink to related letters and glossary indexes.
UVP is selling the DMDE at a variety of price points, ranging from $545 for academic libraries to $145 for high school libraries. The price entitles buyers to receive additional material as it is added to the DMDE (there are approximately 1,800 more letters to be added to the archive).
Other Rotunda projects in the works include a collection of the letters of Emily Dickinson that is now in a beta test. But UVP's big project is to put the papers of six of the country's founding fathers—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams—into digital collections. UVP has electronic licensing deals for the Washington, Hamilton and Madison collections and is in negotiations for the electronic rights to Jefferson, Franklin and Adams.
To date, UVP's digital efforts have been underwritten by matching grants from the Andrew Mellon Foundation and UV, but Rotunda needs to become self-sustaining by June 2006, and Saunders believes electronic publishing gives UVP the best chance of hitting that goal.
