In 1988, The Packard Humanities Institute (PHI) initiated
a collaboration with The Papers of Benjamin Franklin with
the goal of creating a digital version of the Franklin
papers. We thought that the ability to search the
complete papers would be useful to the scholarly team
editing the remaining volumes. Even more exciting was
the opportunity to make Franklin's complete writings
freely accessible to the public.
CD ROMs were the appropriate media for public
distribution in 1988, and PHI was using them for projects
involving Greek and Latin. We created a series of
Franklin CD ROMs, but these were never widely distributed
except to a few people who knew enough to ask for them.
From time to time we dreamed of convincing a visionary
computer maker to "pre-install" Benjamin Franklin on
every PC out of the box.
It has been obvious for some time that a Franklin website
is a more practical solution. Not long ago, we set
ourselves the goal of creating a website to celebrate
Franklin's 300th birthday on January 17, 2006. The
information contained in the website is based on many
years of work, but its presentation in "web format" is a
very recent effort. You should consider the website
itself as only a first draft. In particular, some of the
tables may not display properly yet. (We worked hard to
format these correctly for our CD ROM versions.)
Recently the wholesale digitizing of millions of library
books has been in the news. Technology can make some
tasks incredibly efficient, but some worthwhile projects
still take a long, long time. The editorial team at Yale
has been working faithfully for 50 years on The Papers of
Benjamin Franklin. PHI has been involved (on a much
smaller scale) for 15 years.
The people at PHI who have worked on the Digital Ben
Franklin project are: Stephen V.F. Waite, Wilkins Poe,
Patricia Doherty, and David W. Packard.