As you may recall, the Cabell Foundation is looking seriously at applying for a grant to preserve our digital heritage.

At the moment, the primary focus will be on getting the 2000-4000 pages of 1955-2007 material into digital form.  TIFF and PDF files.  I understand this pretty well.

What I do not understand is how the files might be (1) organized and (2) presented to the public via the internet.  At the moment, since everything(newsletters, clippings, brochures, etc) except the photos will have retrievable text, the most basic way would be to just put them out there and let people "do their thing."  I anticipate that at some point comments will be added to Photo PDF files.

Members of The Cabell Foundation have already moved strongly into Digital Heritage, before we even knew that is what we were doing.  e.g.  

- ALL the minutes of the Board of Directors and the Membership meetings have been OCRd to retrievable text in PDF
- "The Cabells and Their Kin in the Civil War" -- a small monograph was re-published earlier this year as PDF
- "Hey, You're My Cousin" -- one-person's  view of the first 50 years of the Foundation will be released this week in PDF
- A third party, not related to the Cabell Foundation, offers Alexander Brown's "The Cabells and Their Kin" on a CD

But the magnitude of the contemplated effort will require that if the Foundation goes for it, we must contract this out.  We simply do not have within the Foundation the expertise, the facilities or the time.

I have two questions for the information-technology folks reading this.

#1 - Is there anything that we should add to the planned output that would make it more useful to you and the general public?

#2 - Are there any institutions out there who are interested enough to learn more, and possibly make portions of the collection available through their websites, ala the Cabell Papers Project at Alderman Library?  (If you want to see more, go to www.cabell.com and you will find the link to that project.)

Randy Cabell
The Trumpeter of Jamestowne Today
The Preserver of our Digital Heritage Tomorrow :))