Thomas Raddall Electronic Archives Project

New e-edition of correspondence

On behalf of members of the committee that made this electronic edition of letters possible, I am pleased to send the Humanist list our official announcement of the completion of the first phase of the project:


Thomas Raddall Electronic Archives Project

The Thomas Raddall Electronic Archives Project is creating an electronic archive featuring selected significant writings by Thomas Raddall, one of Canada's and Nova Scotia's foremost authors and historians. Dalhousie University Libraries announces the electronic publication of Selected Correspondence of Thomas Raddall, a selection of Raddall's letters dating from 1937 to 1979. Visitors may search the electronic archive for references to people, places, literary works (both Raddall's own and by others), as well as subjects ranging from Guglielmo Marconi to Mi'kmaq history, Rudyard Kipling to Hugh MacLennan, the American Revolution to the history of Halifax, and nautical studies to natural history.

The Thomas Raddall Electronic Archives Project is available to users world-wide through the Dalhousie Libraries' website,
http://www2.library.dal.ca/archives/trela/trela.htm.

Supported by a grant from the Birks Family Foundation and with the assistance of Dalhousie University's Electronic Text Centre, a project team based in the Killam Library designed and edited the electronic version of Raddall's correspondence. The HTML version of each transcribed letter is accompanied by a thumbnail and a full-size image of the original page, a content summary, subject headings and annotations. Letters are marked up in TEI-conformant SGML using Word Perfect SGML. Searches are not performed on the live SGML, but on a database index compiled using sgrep (structured grep), a software application for searching and indexing SGML, XML and HTML files.

Dalhousie University Libraries is proud to hold the papers and personal library of Thomas Head Raddall. Considered one of Canada's most successful writers of the 20th century, Raddall wrote such classics as The Nymph and the Lamp and Halifax, Warden of the North. The Libraries also hold the copyright to these and Raddall's other published works, as well as to his papers, research files, correspondence and photographs related to his life and writings.

For information on the Thomas Raddall Electronic Archives including the use of works by Thomas Raddall, please contact Holly Melanson, Assistant University Librarian, Collection Development, Organization & Management, Dalhousie University Libraries, Halifax, NS B3H 4C7.