Email received March, 2008:
Fantastico! . . .You're creating something that fills a huge need.
It's a catalyst. It's brilliant. . .

I spent nearly two decades as a documentary historian with the Thomas A. Edison Papers at Rutgers University, first as an editor and then nearly seven years as director of the project (1995-2002). During that time electronic publication became a possibility, then a desideratum, and finally a necessity.

Although there was increasing pressure to create a digital edition, the required tools, funding, and other support were just becoming available and were far from standardized. As a result the Edison Papers, like other editions trying to find their way, had to determine best practice--which included an attempt to predict the technological direction of a frenetically growing internet-largely independently, making educated guesses that accommodated the content and format of our documents.

Today, the standardization represented by such public institutions as the TEI P5 Guidelines and the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), to say nothing of the nearly mature commercial e-book readers from Sony and Amazon, indicate that digital publishing is coming into its own. At the same time, historians and biographers are ever more appreciative of the scholarship behind documentary editions; typical is Harvard Sitkoff's comment at the beginning of the bibliographical essay that closes his recent biography of Martin Luther King, Jr: "Like anyone writing about Martin Luther King, Jr., I am foremost indebted to Clayborne Carson, the director and editor in chief of the massive Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project.”

. . .Documents Compass is timely, intelligent, and informed with a deep knowledge of the ecology of documentary editing and electronic publishing. The three principals could not be better suited for the job. I spent several summers teaching electronic editing at the NHPRC Editing Institute, and the needs I saw in the attendees-from single historians working on diaries in local historical societies to editors deeply involved with established projects at research universities--are exactly the needs targeted by Documents Compass. The services offered cover the broad spectrum required by the profession. As a service provider Documents Compass would have the catalytic potential to ease the way for many projects and, in some cases, make possible editions that would otherwise never come to fruition. It is truly an idea whose time has come.

Robert Rosenberg