Talk:The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787/Volume 1

Availability online

I am aware of two sources for digital versions of The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, Volume 1 as compiled by Farrand.

• Library of Congress, at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwfr.html. Somewhat unhelpfully, and seemingly arbitrarily, broken up into multiple web pages, each corresponding to 1–5 or so pages of Farrand's original text. On the plus side, the LoC site features scanned images of each page in the book, very useful for checking accuracy and correcting formatting (if you're not lucky enough to have the printed volumes handy).
• something called the "Online Library of Liberty," at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/Home3/HTML.php?recordID=0544.01, has a better-formatted HTML version of the text, as well as a scanned PDF copy of the entire work. The many tables appearing in the original work are poorly formatted in the HTML version, however.

Neither of these online versions takes advantage of the potential of hypertext, however. The footnotes to each entry, for example, frequently reference items in the appendices (collected in Volume 3). The work would be that much more useful, however, if those items could be converted to clickable links once the text is online. Adding the text to Wikisource, accordingly, seems like a good first step in the process.

Because Farrand's Records are frequently cited by courts in the United States (referenced by volume and page number), it seems preferable to preserve the original pagination to make it easier to locate the materials being cited. I have tried to do this in the entries posted so far by marking page boundaries with Template:page break, but would be interested to know if there is a preferable way to accomplish this. —Tarmstro99 02:56, 10 March 2007 (UTC)