The American Presidency Project

The American Presidency Project is a digitization initiative established in 1999 by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Woolley and Peters are, respectively, a graduate student and a political science professor at UCSB. The site claims to provide access to over 73,000 “documents related to the study of the presidency.” I chose to discuss this site because it provides a large amount of audio and visual material. I was somewhat surprised, however, that the information provided about the project itself is quite sparse. Technical information about the media files was also largely inaccessible.

Collection Principles

The collection may aspire to broad coverage, even to a level of comprehensiveness. Still, the site highlights a number of items and collections judged to be of greater value or interest. The site provides “Our list of important instances of presidential rhetoric in the 'Modern' Era” (FDR’s inaugural address in number one), State of the Union speeches, and a section entitled “Rallying the Nation to War.” Much can be inferred from such categories, but there is no stated collection policy, and I was not able to get a precise idea of exactly how comprehensive the site is, or what might have been left out.

Object Characteristics

In the case of presidential speeches, the audio and video files are accompanied by transcriptions. The media files are in QuickTime format. I don’t find any images of documents; all are transcribed. The method of text capture is not stated. I was able to discover almost no specific details about the media objects or their creation. Many of the links that indicated video objects turned out to be audio only.

Metadata

The complex search functions offered by the site suggest that quite a bit of metadata accompanies the digital objects. A user can search by date, document category, or president’s name. The site also enables Boolean text searching, and searching by Public Papers Document Number, Executive Order number, or Proclamation number. The audio/visual archive is categorized by president and is small enough to be easliy browsable.

Audience

The site strives for a global audience, and the homepage provides a small map of the world that shows the distribution of users. The US, of course, shows the greatest usage, but Europe and parts of Asia also show considerable usage. These users are likley mostly historians, other academics, and people involved in politics in various ways, in addition to interested individuals. As is likely the case with any university-based project, the faculty and students at that university are also a target audience, and this site includes a link to the syllabus for an UCSB class on the presidency.