eReviews

University of Virginia Pr., rotunda.upress.virginia.edu

Rotunda's American Founding Era Collection contains The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition, 33 volumes published through 2006, to be joined soon by the first four volumes of the Retirement Series, documenting the period between Jefferson's return to private life and his death in 1826; The Adams Papers Digital Edition, 30 volumes of the Adams Papers, including John Adams's complete diaries, legal papers, and an ongoing series of family correspondence and state papers; The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, 55 volumes of the print edition encompassing five series and the complete diaries; and The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, more than 900 letters, with an additional 2000 letters to follow in periodic updates. These are integrated XML-based archives that let users cross-search and cross-navigate the entire collection by chronology. Soon to be added contents for the collection include The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, The Papers of James Madison, and The Papers of Alexander Hamilton.

HOW DOES IT WORK? Segments of this collection have already been reviewed (see LJ 5/15/05 and LJ 8/07), but those reviews were based on the former search interface, which was designed to search separate collections. This review is based on the new Founding Era platform, which has the goal "to produce a modular framework that would allow the American Founding Era to perform as a single publication in many respects, while also enabling publication-specific features where desired."

The new search screen is made up of a toolbar at screen top (Entry, About, Search, Preferences, Log Out, Help [navigation]); a column of links to the four Founders presently in the collection (Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Washington), followed by a column of section choices (Chronology and Search Results) and a navigational "compass" that can lead you through the collection; and, underneath all that material, a series of links to the individual digital collections. It's not the most transparent interface I've ever encountered, and I have to admit to a personal distaste for navigational compasses in online files. However, I experimented a bit (reading the About section helped a lot) and discovered that if I clicked on Preferences I could turn off the compass and change the order in which search results are displayed (relevance, date forward, date backward). Once I got rid of the compass, I went directly into Search to try my luck.

CAN YOU USE IT? Search gave me a number of access points and options, including a Search box, a Scope box, Languages option, and an Exact Form (e.g., "case-sensitive," "diacritic-sensitive," "punctuation-sensitive"). These were followed by Name 1 and Name 2 boxes—as I typed a name, the system searched for possible matches and offered them up in a clickable alphabetical list—followed by the number of documents in which the name appeared. I could also stipulate if I wanted to search the name as author of a letter and/or recipient of a letter. Nice.

This was followed by date range boxes letting me limit my search within the period Jan. 1, 1700, to Dec. 31, 1849. Beneath that a window let me limit my search to the individual collections if I so desired, and beneath that was a drop-down menu letting me choose my sort choice (relevance, etc.). If I didn't choose an individual collection, the final button directs the system to Search the Founding Era Collection.

I inadvertently did a more sophisticated initial search than originally planned. I had plugged the name "Adams" into the first Name box to check out how that box worked, and I forgot to delete it when I came to do a search for the word bandages. So I got a result of two: a letter from John Adams to Abigail Smith, 13 April 1764, and a letter from John Quincy Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, 12 December 1784.

In both letters, the word bandage appears. When I viewed the results, I saw my mistake and went back and did a search just for the word bandages and got 19 results, in which both the words bandage and bandages were picked up (I hadn't checked Exact Form in my search). Very nice.

I went back up to the column of links to the Founders and clicked on "Madison," then "Chronology," and got links to the decades for which material appears in the collection (1780s through the 1840s). At each click a new result pops up, taking you through the years, months, and individual documents included in the collection. For example, in the 1780s a single document appears: Dolley Payne Todd Madison to Elizabeth Brooke Ellicott [December 1788].

At the end of the document is a link that lets you "See this document in the standalone Dolley Madison Digital Edition," where you get a good deal of additional contextual historical information.

WHAT'S THE COST? Pricing is based on Carnegie classifications. Libraries may buy all titles or individual titles. If the acquiring library buys a whole collection, Rotunda takes 20 percent off the price. It also takes 20 percent off the price of the title that a library owns in print.

HOW GOOD IS IT? I was initially a little dubious about this new search interface, but within the space of five minutes it won me over (especially since I could get rid of the compass!). Rotunda has gathered these collections together to be searchable as one entity, yet they have retained all the detail and enhancements of the original products—no mean feat.

One minor thing I would like to see changed in upcoming releases: the results note at screen top when you do a search needs to be bolder and more noticeable—it took some looking to find it.

The space available to me here can't do full justice to the file, but you get the idea: this is a powerhouse of primary-source documents—the kind of resource only digitization can make widely available—and that's just what Rotunda is doing with these invaluable collections. A ten!

BOTTOM LINE Rotunda's pricing model makes the Collection accessible to a wide range of institutions. Heartily recommended for academic, public, and special libraries, as well as all libraries with strong American history programs.