Lincoln Editor

              July - September 2007 Volume 7 Number 3
PROJECT SUFFERS LOSS OF EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBER
In August, editorial board member Phillip Shaw Paludan
died after a long illness. A professor of history and the
Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the
University of Illinois at Springfield, Dr. Paludan served on
the project’s board since 2001.
Professor Paludan held a Ph.D. in history from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was the
author of four books and dozens of articles on the Civil War
era, including The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln (1994)
and A People’s Contest (1988). He received the Lincoln
Prize for his book on Lincoln’s presidency.
In addition to being an active board member, he was
a ready supporter of the project
and a regular participant of the
staff’s book discussion group.
Staff members deeply feel the loss
of his friendship, his expansive
knowledge of Abraham Lincoln
and nineteenth-century American
history, his research and writing
talents, and his wit and engaging
personality.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS DIGITIZATION UNDERWAY
The Papers of Abraham Lincoln and the Library of
Congress (LC) began a cooperative effort to digitize
documents from the Robert Todd Lincoln Collection of
Abraham Lincoln Papers. In August, Associate Editor John
Lupton traveled to Washington, D.C., to coordinate the
process and train new staff members.
In August, staff specialists from the Library’s Digital
Scan Center began the work. They are using a Phase One,
P 45 digital camera to shoot 600 ppi images of the
documents, which are bound in 220 conservator’s volumes.
After scanning, LC specialists then store the files on external
hard drives for Papers of Abraham Lincoln staff members.
New staff members A J Aiséirithe and John Macaulay process
the scans by cropping the images and saving the files as
master tiffs. The Library of Congress will eventually replace
the grayscale images currently mounted on their American
Memory website with the new color images prepared by
this project. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln will transfer
our master files to the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications for long-term storage.
The Robert Todd Lincoln Collection, consisting of
approximately 20,000 documents, is the largest single
collection of Lincoln
documents in the world.
The great majority of the
material relates to
Lincoln’s presidential
years and includes some
extremely significant
documents, such as
Lincoln’s draft of his
second inaugural
address.
After the digitization of the Robert Todd Lincoln
Collection materials, LC scanning specialists will turn their
attention to Lincoln’s legal documents and correspondence
in the Herndon-Weik Collection and to a number of other
collections containing Lincoln documents.
The project would like to thank James Hutson and
John Sellers for their support in imaging the collection,
Michael Neubert and Tim Stutz for overseeing the
cooperative endeavor, and Dominic Sergi of the Digital Scan
Center for supervising the imaging specialists.
Camera Setup
at the Library of Congress