Manuscripts of the American Civil War

http://www.rarebooks.nd.edu/digital/civil_war/index.shtml

This week I am looking at the Manuscripts of the American Civil War Collection at the University of Notre Dame Rare Books and Special Collections. This collection is divided into 6 parts: Topical Collections, Personal Papers, Military Records, Letters, Diaries and Journals, and Singld Manuscripts.

Selection
The entire collection cataloged online is not digitized. Only a handful of entries are. But, each subgroup that is digitized is digitized fully. For example, in the Letters group there are about 53 listings; of those, I think 23 sets are digitized. Within each set, whether it is 1 letter or 50, all are digitized. Envelopes are digitized along with the letters. I could not find an explanation of why some sets were digitized and others not. I imagine they digitized the most interesting, most important or most often studied sets.

Metadata
Every group has an introduction, provenance note and bibliographic note before the index of items. Generally each item has the following information provided, depending on form:
Letters: document type, author, date, place, to whom the letter was written, physical description, number, and transcirbers. Each item has a transcription with clear page breaks and numbers to match to the digital images
Diaries: page numbers, date of entries, author, content, number
Military Records: document type, document title, author, date, place, to whom written, endorsement, physical description, number
Personal Papers: document type, author, date, physical description, notes, number, transcribers

Object Characteristics
For each image, the user has the choice of 72 dpi, 100 dpi or 150 dpi. A technical note informs us that images were scanned in full color at 300 dpi and saved as compressed tiff files. They started the project using UMAX Mirage II flatbed scanners (2001-2005); now materials are scanned on Microtek ScanMaker 9800XL scanners. The online images are jpeg files and are also converted to black and white and manipulated to provide a high enough contrast to be able to read the letters. I think its a bit disappointing to only be able to see B&W images, but perhaps this is the easiest way to read them (?).

Audience
Civil War scholars I think would really enjoy this site because of the level of detail--the background information, the transcriptions, the 3 image sizes. It would allow a good amount of research without going to the university itself, and without having to handle (and damage) the documents. Maybe there are people who study handwriting (?) who would appreciate all the samples and the heightened contrast the B&W digital images provide.