A Digital Library of Willa Cather's Literary Manuscripts

FAIN: PW-285125-22

University of Nebraska, Lincoln (Lincoln, NE 68503-2427)
Andrew Wade Jewell (Project Director: July 2021 to present)
Melissa J. Homestead (Co Project Director: July 2022 to present)
Emily J. Rau (Co Project Director: September 2022 to present)

The Willa Cather Archive proposes to create a digital library of American novelist Willa Cather's literary manuscripts (broadly construed to encompass all pre-publication forms of her work). These materials are currently distributed across a range of repositories and are largely ignored by scholars and students of her writing. Our plan is to create a digital library of these materials that includes: 1) high-resolution images of each document, sufficient to facilitate close inspection of its details; 2) rich metadata about each item capturing its relationship to Cather's published work and other documents, its physical properties, the editorial hands visible on it, and other details about its creation; and 3) an expert-authored document analysis that describes, in straightforward prose, details about the manuscript that will help users make sense of its meaning and its place in the evolution of a particular work, including its relationship to other documents in the digital library.