The King Center Collection: A Dream and an archive

The King Center in Atlanta published today a beautiful presentation of an impressive collection of Martin Luther King's papers. The online archive includes over 1 million documents  -http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/about-the-archive 



The presentation does several things

A magnificent use of color

Creative and thought provoking navigation

Careful presentation by theme

Given my work with the Lincoln Telegrams project (http://lincolntelegrams.com), I was particularly interested in this presentation of telegrams sent and received by King.

Here is the introduction to the telegrams collection. I copied te formatting along with the text.

Telegrams

Since the 1800’s Telegrams have been responsible for relaying important and urgent information. Prior to telegrams, nearly all information was limited to traveling at the speed of a human or animal. The telegram freed communication from the constraints of space and time and truly affected how the world lived. In many ways telegrams can be thought of as an early form of Twitter. Similar to the restriction of 140 characters within a Tweet, writers of telegrams needed to be thoughtful in their message crafting and word selection. This was so both for economical reasons and the desire to speed the transmission of the telegram. For this reason, the messages within telegrams are often quite direct and strategic in their formation.

Here's a screen shot of the interface for accessing the telegrams. This screen shot illustrates the graphical interface. A more traditional list interface is also available.

See more of the telegrams here

http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/tile?field_term_genre_tid=5101&keys=telegrams