The Integrated Catalog of Walt Whitman’s Literary Manuscripts

Abstract

NEARLY TEN YEARS ago the Whitman Archive created the Guide to Walt Whitman's Poetry Manuscripts, a resource that provided access to nearly all of these items, pulling together manuscripts spread across more than thirty repositories and offering item-level descriptions and scanned images of each. Using EAD (Encoded Archival Description), the nonproprietary de facto standard for the encoding of finding aids, the Archive project created individual catalogs for all of these repositories, describing the Whitman poetry manuscripts held in each. The individual manuscript descriptions were also combined to form the Integrated Guide, a resource that for the first time provided access to all of Whitman's poetry manuscripts in one virtual collection. This guide was organized around the concept of Whitman's allowing users to see all of the known manuscripts that contributed to a given poem.1 For this project, the Walt Whitman Archive was awarded the Society of American Archivists' C.F.W. Coker Award, for setting national standards in archival description, in 2006.Now, the Whitman Archive is proud to unveil a greatly expanded version of this resource: the Catalog of Walt Whitman's Literary Manuscripts. This new iteration, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, has added descriptions and images of more than 500 prose manuscripts, providing unprecedented access to early versions of Whitman's writings and shedding light on the creative process behind Whitman's prose. These additions bring the total number of manuscripts described in the Integrated Catalog to nearly 1,500. Each item-level entry provides a title, composition date, genre, repository location information, physical characteristics, and a description of the textual content of the item. Access to images of the original manuscript is provided whenever possible.As an initial stage of the prose project, Whitman Archive staff members compiled a list of all of Whitman's known prose manuscripts.A given manuscript can be associated with any number of works, and thus may appear multiple times in the Integrated Catalog, listed separately under each work to which it contributed. We compiled the list by consulting Edward F. Grier's six-volume Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts and William White's Daybooks and Notebooks (both published by New York University Press as part of The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman). To this we added those prose manuscripts, several hundred of which were unaccounted for in these print volumes, for which the Whitman Archive had acquired images and records during the past two decades. Finally, using ArchiveGrid, an online database that aggregates the records of more than 1,000 archival institutions, we sought out any remaining Whitman prose manuscripts. Totaling close to 2,000 items, this list represents the first attempt to document the scale of Whitman's extant prose output in manuscript form.The project's initial goal was to then write item-level EAD descriptions for all of Whitman's prose manuscripts, as we had done for the poetry. However, it soon became clear that such a goal was unrealistic given the sheer volume of prose manuscripts, their overall complexity, and the amount of time required first to determine a given manuscript's relationship to Whitman's larger body of published work and then to write the EAD description itself. We thus decided to confine our item-level descriptions only to those items that could, with reasonable confidence, be identified as having contributed to a piece of published prose. Of course, we hope to someday have the resources to include item-level descriptions for all 2,000 prose manuscripts. The addition of the prose material also necessitated the creation of individual manuscript catalogs for approximately twenty new repositories, meaning that the Archive's Integrated Catalog now brings together manuscripts that are spread across more than fifty repositories around the world. …