Introduction

The Willa Cather Archive is an ambitious endeavor to create a rich, useful, and widely-accessible site for the study of Willa Cather's life and writings. To that end, we are providing digital editions of Cather texts and scholarship free to the public as well as creating a large amount of unique, born-digital scholarly content. The Archive is a product of a partnership between the Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, University of Nebraska–Lincoln Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, The University of Nebraska Press, and the Cather Project at the University of Nebraska.

The project originated in 1997, and over the years has digitized and published hundreds of thousands of words of Cather-authored texts and Cather scholarship. It now includes, in a fully-searchable format, digital transcriptions of five Cather books (copyright law forbids digitally republishing her post-1922 works), all of her short fiction pre-1912, her interviews, speeches, and public letters, her uncollected nonfiction from the 1910s, the complete run of Cather Studies, the back issues of Teaching Cather, a large gallery of photographs, multiple biographies, announcements and news from the Cather scholarly community, virtual tours of Cather-related locales, and much more. In addition to encoding Cather's remaining pre-1922 periodical publications, in progress are ambitious projects to present an expanded, electronic edition of Janis Stout's 2002 book, A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather; a searchable annotated bibliography of Cather's reading by Sharon Hoover and Melissa Ryan; an expanded, searchable gallery of photographs; and encoded transcriptions of Cather's manuscripts at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Archives and Special Collections.

The Archive is a foundational endeavor of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, a joint project of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries and the College of Arts & Sciences to focus, provide support, and deepen the quality of the growing array of digital humanities scholarship on the University of Nebraska–Lincoln campus.

The following essay, which was presented at the 2005 International Willa Cather Seminar, provides additional details about the plans, philosophy, and ambitions of the Cather Archive:

"The Professor's Mouse: Cather Scholarship in the Digital Age"

If you have any questions or comments about the Cather Archive, please contact Andrew Jewell at:

Andrew Jewell
Editor, Willa Cather Archive
Assistant Professor of Digital Projects
29 Love Library
University of Nebraska–Lincoln
Lincoln, NE 68588-4100
402.472.5266
ajewell@unlnotes.unl.edu