Manuscripts of the American Civil War

Manuscripts of the American Civil War is a project being worked on by the Department of Special Collections at the University of Norte Dame. The collection includes documents between the years 1861-1865 as well as documents that were released that had immediate relevence to the Civil War.

There is no indication on the site how they determine what is included, only that the pieces are releated to the Civil War. The site does explain that it has displayed what is in the departments holdings. The individual series are distinguished by unity of provenance. They continue to explain that because of this, the series will differ in size.

The site includes images and textual transcriptions of the documents. There is even a link that contains a detailed explination on edits that were done for the textual transcriptions. Each of the series contains a detailed explination as to what is in each series, including how many documents are in that particular series, a history of that series and links in the explination. There is also an optional index link that will take the user to a list of the documents. The documents are then listed by number, ms type, date, place(s) and author. When a link is selected, each document has physical description as well. There is also an option of viewing it at 150 DPI, 100 DPI and 72 DPI.

Each of the images are scanned in color at 300 DPI and saved as a compressed .TIFF image file. They are then archived on a CD. The images were first scanned on a UMAX Mirage II flatbed scanner and now are scanned on a Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL scanner. This is all contained in the Technical Details link.

This site can serve both a general audience as well as an academic audience. The site is user friendly, but at the same time has information that would be important for academics, such as dates, provenence, and the technical aspects and editing notes for the documents.