By Senior Editor Jennifer Stertzer & Research Editor Erica Cavanaugh

One of the many interesting challenges the George Washington Financial Papers Project (GWFPP) team has faced is how best to make content accessible, or more accurately, intellectually accessible. This is hardly a new challenge, though, as editors have always worked to move beyond mere availability.

Regardless of approach (whether print or digital), documentary editions are created to make documents and content accessible: transcriptions make hard-to-decipher text...

By Jennifer E. Stertzer, Senior Editor

Making George Washington’s financial papers accessible had been an early goal of the Washington Papers, but given the intricacies of the financial papers and our means of publication, very little had been done. In the 1980s, the Washington Papers published several cash accounts (in print) from the ledgers in the Colonial Series of the Papers of George Washington. Over the years, we included a few others as documents and used them for our annotations where possible. Things began to shift as we moved forward with our digital...