The Papers of Andrew Jackson

Expanding our partnership with the UVA Press’s Rotunda, CPC has added the Papers of Andrew Jackson to its collection. The Papers of Andrew Jackson is a documentary editing project at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. The project has published nine volumes of Jackson’s papers from 1770 to 1831. It anticipates that 17 volumes will be published before the project is done. Dr. Daniel Feller, a professor of history at UT Knoxville, is the director of the papers project.

Rotunda, UVA’s digital imprint, has published the digital version of the Jackson’s papers as part of its American Founding Era collection. The Jackson papers join other presidential papers such as those of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Andrew Jackson is one of the most important presidents in American history. He was a transformative figure between the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, remembered for founding the Democratic Party and for expanding the powers of the presidency. We are excited to have added this valuable collection to CPC!

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Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University

Connecting Presidential Collections is thrilled to announce a new partner: the G. Robert Vincent Voice Library at Michigan State University. The Vincent Voice Library brings a unique collection of audio clips to CPC. Some of the clips are more contemporary such as President Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address and President George W. Bush’s Address to Congress after the September 11, 2001, attacks. But the collection also includes rare gems such as a campaign speech from William Taft in 1912 and a Fourth of July speech by Calvin Coolidge from 1920.

Recordings from Taft, Coolidge along with Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Warren Harding allow CPC users to hear presidents whose voices are unknown to most people. The audio recordings also add a multimedia dimension to CPC that we hope we to expand in the future.

Beyond its presidential selection, the Vincent Voice Library holds more than 100,000 hours of audio recordings. The collection was founded by G. Robert Vincent who began making recordings in 1912 after borrowing a recording device from his friend, Charles, who was Thomas Edison’s son. We are excited to welcome the Vincent Voice Library as a partner to CPC!

Vancouver, here we come!

The CPC team is excited to be headed west! Not permanently, but we are packing our bags for the Digital Libraries Federation (DLF) Forum, being held in Vancouver, British Columbia in October.

Connecting Presidential Collections was selected as a Snapshot project update. In 2013, we did a poster presentation of CPC at the DLF Forum in Denver, CO. At that point, the project was mostly theoretical–we had only created a very basic beta website (that looked very different than the site does today). We had 6 partnerships and only about 25,000 items in CPC. Today CPC has 12 partnerships with more than 260,000 items covering 32 out of the 43 presidents. We have come a long way!

Of course, we will cover these updates in our talk but more importantly we will talk about the surprises that have come up and the lessons we have learned in the 2 years we have been working on this 3-year grant project sponsored by the IMLS and the Miller Center. We will also cover the work that we have been doing to smooth out the rough (and varying) edges of our partners’ metadata so that it can all play nicely together in our Solr index.

We will post the slides to our talk after October. Hope to see some of you there!