Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition Sponsors

Overview

In 2002, a team of scholars, librarians, and University of Nebraska Press staff began work on a pilot site featuring 200 pages of the Nebraska edition of the Lewis and Clark journals edited by Gary E. Moulton, as well as a preliminary selection of supplementary texts and readings. The project team met weekly over a six-month period. During the pilot project, the team explored numerous issues, such as which texts to use and which copyright permissions to seek; standards to follow in encoding and tagging elements that were needed for the Lewis and Clark document type definition; whether to use HTML or eXstensible Stylesheet Language Transformation or some combination of the two for web presentation; how to develop web-ready recorded sound; and various design issues, such as how to create a site that operates within many browsers and yet maintains the standards of design for which the University of Nebraska Press is noted. Other issues considered were scalability, sustainability, and funding for the full project. Staff submitted a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).

In November 2002 the pilot site was unveiled and comments encompassing all these elements were solicited from selected reviewers around the country. The site became available to the public in February 2003. In September 2003 the team learned that the NEH had awarded a grant to fund the complete online edition of the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Beginning in early 2004 the project team began adding to the Web site 250 new pages of text per month, with a goal of making the entirety of the journals and supplementary texts available to the public by the end of March 2005. Before each addition of text, the material was encoded, styled, and proofread for typographical errors. Decisions were made regarding the appearance of the online text in relation to its original print format. At the end of March 2005, the last pages from the Journals were made available. Supplementary materials continue to be added to the site.