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The Library of Congress
At present, there is no site where Lincoln's papers can be consulted comprehensively. The Lincoln Legal Papers: A Documentary History of the Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln, 1836-1861 is available in DVD-ROM format. Basler's edition of The Collected Works can be accessed electronically at the University of Michigan web site. Also coming on-line is a substantial portion of the of Abraham Lincoln Papers; the Library of Congress's National Digital Library has posted digital scans of these documents for public access, and over the past two and a half years the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, with a team under the direction of Douglas L. Wilson and Rodney O. Davis, has been transcribing and annotating thousands of documents in that collection. The results are available on the Library of Congress's American Memory web site.
The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress were microfilmed by 1960, but those reels have been little used. The public and scholars alike seem averse to the microfilm edition, for many documents are hard to read because of faint ink or bad handwriting. Transcriptions of the documents will enable readers to use them much more easily. As Mark Neely, Jr., the Pulitzer-prize-winning author of The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties, put it: "Fifty years have passed since the opening of the Lincoln Papers, and they still have not been done justice." On the worldwide web they will be done justice.
The Presidential Papers of Abraham Lincoln On-line aims to supplement and coordinate the work done by Basler, the Lincoln Legal Papers, the Library of Congress Presidential Papers microfilm project, and the Lincoln Studies Center team to create an authoritative, comprehensive version of Lincoln's words along with his incoming correspondence. It will integrate the new documents with the Basler edition and the Abraham Lincoln Papers already on microfilm (and partially available on-line).
Abraham Lincoln.
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