During the past two summers numerous student interns have been working at digitizing William Stafford's daily writings. The image at the right shows Nick Erickson scanning a page of Stafford's writing from the last week of his life.
Last summer we digitized and posted the daily writings and related materials for all of the poems in the books West of Your City and Traveling through the Dark at williamstaffordarchives.org This summer we are finishing digitizing every page of his daily writings. In fact, we anticipate the final page to be digitized sometime next week. Although there are no immediate plans to post all of this content online, having the material digitized is an important form of preservation. It provides a backup copy in the unlikely case that an original were to be damaged. Having a digital copy also allows for scholars to study Stafford's writings without excessive handling of the originals. For scholars that don't live in the Pacific Northwest, the creation digital copies of Stafford's manuscripts also opens up the possibility of remote access and research. All of these developments are exciting to the staff here at Lewis & Clark, and it is our hope that everyone interested in Stafford's writing will benefit from this project.
