"The Most [Undecipherable] Difficulties": Sustaining and Transcribing the Papers of the War Department

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 10:00:00 -0500

One of the most complicated websites RRCHNM has been sustaining in recent years is the Papers of the War Department (PWD), a crowdsourced transcription project to recover and make accessible the once-lost papers of the War Department whose offices burned to the ground in 1800. The project began with document collection and digitization efforts in the 1990s, but only became a website and an RRCHNM project two decades ago, in 2006.

Jessica Otis on Sustainable DH

"The Most [Undecipherable] Difficulties": Sustaining and Transcribing the Papers of the War Department