Welcome to eLaboratories or eLabs—a virtual community developed to empower practitioners who engage in activities of editing and recovery. We would like to take a moment to introduce you to what you can find on our site today and describe what you can expect to find on it in the coming months.
As of our site launch, three courses are now available to take online for free: What Will Your Edition Look Like?, Organizing Your Documents, and Transcribing Your Documents. These courses are part of the Fundamentals series, which was designed to introduce practitioners to common topics, activities, and questions related to the practices of editing and recovery. Eleven additional courses in this series will be released between now and July 2023. All courses in the Fundamentals series are listed in our Beginner’s Guide, and they can be taken at your own pace in any combination or order.
Recognizing, however, that not everyone will be interested in each of the topics discussed in the Fundamentals series, we have also created topic pages that make it easy to find content about a single element or activity of editing and recovery practices, like Tools & Technologies. These topic pages collect all the courses, upcoming and recorded events, and blog posts that cover the chosen topic. While some of these topic pages may not yet have a lot of content, you can expect more materials to be added soon in the coming year, when we begin work on our next phase of programming and content development.
As we begin planning for that next phase, we would like to note that we welcome feedback of any and all kinds. You can request specific courses, topic pages, or resources you would like to see added to this site by completing any one of the numerous feedback forms we have scattered across eLabs. You can also submit a proposal if there is a course or webinar that you would like to lead yourself. In short, we see this space as a “living website,” meaning that material will frequently be added and updated in our effort to offer resources that reflect and represent the variety of practitioners’ needs and approaches.
Katie Blizzard is a research editor at the Center for Digital Editing, where she contributes to such projects as The Washington Papers and Papers of Martin Van Buren.