On-Line Global Research Tactics for the Twenty-First Century: The Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) Digital Archive and Related Online Resources
Time: Oct 23, 2020 09:00 AM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Zoom Meeting
Presentation by historians at the Office of the Historian at the Department of State:
A brief tour of history.state.gov
- A central, online location for all of the Office of the Historian’s publications
- Most notably, the digital edition of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, the official documentary history of U.S. foreign relations—among many other unique and valuable publications for the study of U.S. diplomacy & the institutional history of the Department of State.
- To offer free, fully accessible and searchable editions available of all resources published by the Office and its predecessors; downloadable ebook editions; and open data formats.
Selected documents:
|
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) |
|
Principal Officers & Chiefs of Mission |
|
Travels of the President & the Secretary of State |
|
Visits by Foreign Leaders & Heads of State |
|
History of Recognition, Diplomatic, Consular Rel’ns |
|
Administrative Timeline of the Department |
Additional publications and resources:
- Scholarly Monographs
- Toward “Thorough, Accurate, and Reliable”: A History of the Foreign Relations of the United States Series (2015)
- War, Neutrality, and Humanitarian Relief: The Expansion of U.S. Diplomatic Activity during the Great War, 1914–1917 (2020)
- “Status of the Series”: information on upcoming FRUS volumes
- Transcripts and videos from 6 conferences
- Minutes of Advisory Committee (“HAC”) meetings
- 537 free, downloadable ebooks of FRUS volumes for iPad, Kindle
Designed by Historians:
- Digitized all print publications using archival guidelines (Library of Congress, University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center)
- Adopted open standards: Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the plain-text, non-proprietary, de facto standard for encoding digital texts; and web technologies (HTML, CSS, and EPUB) for dissemination
- Use free, open source software: eXist-db and TEI Publisher, which excel in the storage and search of TEI (and all XML-encoded) documents
- Open data: all source code and TEI- & XML-encoded data can be downloaded from our GitHub repository: github.com/HistoryAtState
Looking ahead:
- 12 remaining microfiche supplements
- A growing collection of published Office monographs
- Improved search tools: new facets and filters for finer-grained exploration of the information
- People and organizations
- Document types and topics
- Archival source repositories
- … your ideas?
How to Reach us?
- Email: history@state.gov
- Twitter: @HistoryAtState
- GitHub: @HistoryAtState
Final Note:
Until we complete the digitization, the microfiche supplement’s placeholder URL is https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1958-60v17-18mSupp
