New Collection from the LC National Digital Library

[Tamara Swora]

The George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress 

(This announcement is being widely posted)

The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program and the
Manuscript Division announce the online publication of the George
Washington Papers at the Library of Congress on the American Memory
Collections homepage:

 (http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/gwhtml/gwhome.html).

This first release includes forty-one letterbooks (about 8,000) pages
from among 65,000 items to be published online within the next two
years.  Included in the collection as a whole are correspondence,
letterbooks, commonplace books, diaries, journals, financial account
books, military records, reports, and notes, accumulated by Washington
from 1741 through 1799.  The Library of Congress Manuscript Division
holds 85-90% of extant Washington documents.

Washington's life as a Virginia county surveyor, as colonel of the
militia during the French and Indian Was, his election as a delegate to
the First and Second Continental Congresses, and his command of the
American Army during the Revolution, and two presidential
administrations are well documented. Because of the breadth of
Washington's activities, his papers are a rich source for almost every
aspect of colonial and early American history, social and cultural, as
well as political.

The Washington Papers was digitized from the Library of Congress
microfilm of the collection. Documents are presented online as GIF
images and also as 200 dpi grayscale JPEG images. Transcriptions,
provided for most documents, are from copyright available published
editions of the Washington Papers. Reference aids include a selected
bibliography, time line or chronology with links to relevant documents,
educational essays about the George Washington Papers, and technical
information on the digitization of the collection and transcriptions.

Project Coordinators
Martha Anderson
Laura Graham (lgrah at loc.gov)
National Digital Library Program
Library of Congress