The National Archives has beta launched Founders Online, a collection of over 119,000 transcribed and annotated documents from six of the major shapers of the United States: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. The site, a cooperation between National Historical Publications and Records Commission and the University of Virginia Press, allows users to perform full text searches across the corpus, as well as to browse by author, recipient, and time period. The site is built on a MarkLogic database and application server.

Founders Online draws on the tremendous transcription and annotation undertaken by “the editorial staffs of the six Founding Fathers projects at the University of Virginia, University of Chicago, Princeton University, Columbia University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Philosophical Society, and Yale University.” Printed volumes were digitized, rekeyed, and marked up in TEI by the University of Virginia Press. For more information, see the site’s FAQ section.