[PADG:1370] Hannah Arendt Papers Online

[Margaret Alessi <maal@xxxxxxx>]

This message is being widely posted.

Hannah Arendt Papers available on American Memory Web site

The Library of Congress's Manuscript Division, in conjunction with
its American Memory historical collections, presents a digital version
of the manuscript collection relating to the life and activities of
the author, educator, and political philosopher Hannah Arendt
(1906-1975), whose papers are a principal source for the study of
modern intellectual life. Users can access this collection at the
following url:
<http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html>

The papers contain correspondence, articles, lectures, speeches, book
manuscripts, transcripts of the Adolf Eichmann trial proceedings,
notes, and printed matter pertaining to Arendt's writings and academic
career. Among these are correspondence with many of the leading
literary and political figures of the twentieth century, including W.
H. Auden, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Thomas Mann, Dwight Macdonald,
Eric Voegelin, and Norman Podhoretz.  The collection also contains
various drafts of Arendt's published work, in particular The Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and the
controversial and groundbreaking Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).

The entire collection has been digitized and is available in its
entirety to researchers in reading rooms at the Library of Congress,
the New School University in New York City, and the Hannah Arendt
Center at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Selected materials
from the collection are also available for public access on the
Internet.

The digitization of the Hannah Arendt Papers is made possible through
the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Scanning Specifications

During the course of the Arendt Papers project, the entire collection
of 25,000 items was scanned, for a total of approximately 75,000 digital

images. A selection of these is accessible on the Internet. The complete

version of the digital collection is made available to researchers in
the reading room at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress,
at the New School University's Hannah Arendt Center at the Fogelman
Library, and at the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg,

Germany.

The Arendt Papers were scanned as 300 dpi grayscale images which were
compressed using JPEG compression, producing images in the JPEG File
Interchange Format (JFIF). Typically, the National Digital Library
Program (NDLP) has used grayscale to digitize historical manuscripts in
order to capture and display the diversity of tones in manuscript items
and the various nuances of handwriting in pencil and ink. The grayscale
format can often also suppress the bleed-through typical of handwritten
documents in the Arendt Papers. Because JPEG images require considerable

time to download, grayscale GIF images were also created to provide
convenient access using the NDLP page-turner feature.

The materials were scanned on site by the NDLP paper-scanning and
text-conversion contractor, Systems Integration Group (SIG) of Lanham,
Maryland. The PULNiX MFCS-50 H/S Digital Overhead Scanning System,
a fixed-array device capable of scanning 8-bit grayscale and bitonal
images, was used to digitize all the items in the collection. These
included manuscripts, bound volumes, and oversize materials. The
Arendt production team and Systems Integration Group staff worked
with the Library's conservators to ensure proper handling of the
manuscripts during the physical processing of the collection and
subsequent scanning.

Please direct any questions to NDLPCOLL@xxxxxxx