AUTOMOTIVE

"The Papers of Abraham Lincoln is the most significant research initiative of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum," says Illinois State Historian Thomas F. Schwartz, interim executive director of the museum. "The project is now identifying all incoming and outgoing correspondence of Lincoln and capturing color images of these documents. The ultimate goal is to provide an online research and reference work that will provide the color images, transcriptions, and editorial matter for these historical documents, including Lincoln's extensive legal practice." A project of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, and co-sponsored by the University of Illinois at Springfield, the undertaking consists of three series: Lincoln's legal papers, his personal and political correspondence before he became president, and his presidential papers. Project staffers are traveling the country visiting archives searching out anything written by, or to, Lincoln. Items of questionable authenticity are verified by handwriting experts. Once each series is complete and available to the public, users can view the images of the original documents or search the text of the transcriptions and annotations through a sophisticated search engine. "The first series, that of Lincoln's legal papers, will soon be online," says Daniel Stowell, project director and editor, offering access to more than 96,000 documents from Lincoln's legal career through the project's website, its Web site. "Our own internal storage capabilities were quickly reaching capacity with the bulk of the project still to be realized," says Schwartz. "Fortunately, Kirk Hard, NCSA's governmental relations officer, had followed our project and he served as the liaison that led to the wonderful collaboration we now enjoy with NCSA." According to Michelle Butler, technical program manager for the storage enabling technology group, "NCSA is helping free up storage on servers in Springfield by providing a permanent storage archive. The archive server is providing two copies of the data in two different locations for safekeeping. Our group also has created tools to enable the storage process to be easier and require less management by adapting UberFTP to meet their needs." UberFTP, developed at NCSA, is the first interactive, GridFTP-enabled ftp software. Once most of the document gathering is complete, says Butler, project staffers in Springfield will catalog the items, creating an online catalog with links to the items, the majority of which will be links to NCSA archives. "A person will visit the Papers of Abraham Lincoln website, search the catalog, click on the link to the item, and on their screen be viewing an item that is coming to them from NCSA servers." She notes that the most-requested items will probably remain on the project's servers in Springfield but be backed up at NCSA. "NCSA's offer to host the archival images that we have collected from more than 100 repositories thus far is a vital part of our overall effort," Stowell says.