The Wallace Correspondence Project secures yet more funding!

Great news! We have just been awarded a grant of £399,795 GBP by the John Templeton Foundation (USA), which will fund the project for 33 months from 13 May 2015 until 12 February 2018. The grant will pay for backfill for George (the project's Director) to enable him to spend 50% of his time working on the project. It will also pay the salaries of the project's Archivist and two new staff: a full time Subeditor/Researcher and a part time Editor.

Objectives of the project during the grant period are:

1) improve the quality of the data in Wallace Letters Online (WLO) by (a) completing the task of producing 'first level' transcriptions for all manuscripts in WLO (except notebooks); (b) improving the quality of a portion of the first level transcripts so that they meet accepted scholarly standards; (c) checking and correcting metadata about the manuscripts.

2) improve the usability of WLO by (a) providing transcripts of all manuscripts (except notebooks), so that users can search these for keywords and identify manuscripts of interest to them; (b) providing summaries of the text of letters so that users can more easily identify letters they may wish to study.

3) attempt to obtain permission from copyright holders in order that we can display images of more manuscripts in WLO. Scholars often like to see images of the original documents and this is necessary in any case if 'publication quality' transcripts are not yet available for the documents in question.

4) attempt to locate and obtain copies of manuscripts which the project currently does not have or even know about.

5) improve the appearance and usability of the Wallace Letters Online website.

Exciting times for the project. We will be recruiting for the new posts in the New Year.