editorial policy statement revised

I have revised a paragraph of the editorial policy statement relating to correspondence. The paragraph which previously read, "Those letters for which the Archive has digital images have been freshly transcribed and edited, often for the first time. For now, we follow the practices of other editors of correspondence by remaining as unobtrusive as possible and presenting an inclusive text representing as nearly as possible a clean, reading version of the letter. We have not recorded deletions, noted authors' insertions, or attempted to duplicate the appearance of the original holographs. We have omitted letterheads and standardized the placement of salutations, signatures, and postscripts. These decisions have been made on a pragmatic basis and to create consistency among the materials presented. As we secure more digital images of original letters, and as we have time, we will update our XML files and encode all deletions and insertions. In the future, Archive users will have an opportunity to choose between two different ways of viewing the correspondence, either as clean, reading versions or as diplomatic transcriptions," now includes a sentence explaining our treatment of meta-commentary, "Those letters for which the Archive has digital images have been freshly transcribed and edited, often for the first time. For now, we follow the practices of other editors of correspondence by remaining as unobtrusive as possible and presenting an inclusive text representing as nearly as possible a clean, reading version of the letter. We have not recorded deletions, noted authors' insertions, nor attempted to duplicate the appearance of the original holographs. We have also omitted metacommentary in the form of cues such as "(over)" that were relevant to the reader of the original letter as a physical object but are more distracting than helpful in an electronic environment. We have omitted letterheads and standardized the placement of salutations, signatures, and postscripts. These decisions have been made on a pragmatic basis and to create consistency among the materials presented. As we secure more digital images of original letters, and as we have time, we will update our XML files and encode all deletions and insertions. In the future, Archive users will have an opportunity to choose between two different ways of viewing the correspondence, either as clean, reading versions or as diplomatic transcriptions."

~Liz