From Scott Carpenter, Professor of French:

Carl Weiner (History) and I have been involved in a project called "Esternay," located at http://esternay.carleton.edu/. The Esternay project consists of making accessible via the web a vast network of 19th century personal and professional letters, in various formats. We can add scans of original letters, their transcriptions in French, and their translations into English. Because of the way the letters are tagged, we can record various fields (such as date, author, recipient, location, etc.). The goal is to make this historical database available to students and researchers, who can both use the current stock of materials and also work on augmenting them.

All of this information is saved in a MySQL database, access to which is controlled by an interface designed principally in PHP. The first version of this system was created by Aaron Miller, class of '03.

This first version has some limitations that we need help with, and it is not thoroughly documented. We need, in particular, help with the organization of some fields, and the ability to edit materials in fields. Also, we would like to be able to do a back-up of the database at a single click -- and be able to restore the database using earlier back-ups. There are other smaller tasks we would like to discuss.

We have received some funding to support this project.

Interested parties should contact me, Scott Carpenter, at
scarpent@carleton.edu.