Produce a total of 24 volumes on jefferson between 1809 to 1826. I work with a total of 10 people to do that. Our job is to take jeffersons letters and papers and produce an authoritative edition for those years that will enable future scholars to rely on that and not have to go back to the originals. So then, what exactly do you do as a documentary editor . One of the most important things is to make it clear what we are not. You hear of a documentary editor and you think either that you are creating film documentaries, and we have in fact have people had people apply for jobs who were baffled at first because the application was all about how they could splice film, and that was not what we were after. We are also not editors like in a newspaper, who would take an who incoming letter to the it through and make all sorts of corrections. Our job is to give as accurate a representation of the materials that we are editing as possible, so as to convey what was on the handwritten page so the reader doesnt have to go back and read it again. Part of our job is to create an accurate transcription of the letter, or paper, and the other part of the job is to annotated to annotate it, so our readers can understand what they are reading without telling too much so that it gets lost in all of our commentary. We try to steer in between. So, when and how did the papers of Thomas Jefferson project get started . The papers began back in 1943 in honor of the bicentennial of Thomas Jeffersons birth. There had been four earlier editions of jeffersons collective papers. None of them were very good. The Founding Editor in princeton, a great man named julian boyd, started this new project to create the authoritative edition of jeffersons papers. They did two things that were new to documentary editing and which kind of both became standbys for how the work is now done. One is that we are including all of the letters to jefferson as well as the letters from him. Up to that point, that was not how it was done. And there was a tendency, now it seems obvious because you can not understand the letters hes writing if you dont have the c if you dont have the letters he is reading, but at that point there was a tendency to not include those. The other thing boyd, the first editor, did was look for all known copies for every letter to and from jefferson. Up to that point, there was a tendency to just take a big collection of papers and work from that. But he realized that to understand, to get a full picture, you need the copies that were retained as well as those that were sent. So in jeffersons case, we have lots of letters that he kept for himself. But if you dont have the letter that went out the door, you dont necessarily have the post script he might have added. Or if it is an incoming letter, you might have a draft at the other end that will tell you all kinds of things about how the letter was composed. That is how it got started in 1943. The goal was to do all of the important jefferson material from that period on. The original plan was to get everything done in about 10 years and 40 volumes. Here we are much later because it turned out to be a much bigger job than anyone could have anticipated. But we are still doing that work. It started in princeton. Theyre still working in princeton. They are doing wonderful work there and are roughly halfway into his presidency. What brought us here to monticello was the realization in the 1990s that they had been doing it for almost 50 years and jefferson wasnt even president yet. Monticello decided to get involved to try to find a way to get the job done much sooner, in peoples foreseeable lifetime. Monticello negotiated with princeton and we worked out a great deal where princeton would continue working in the period they were working on through the presidency