University of Virginia Press Unlocks Historic Dolley Madison Letters with Mark Logic; Advances Academic Publishing into the Digital Era, Fundamentally Improving Scholarly Research.

SAN MATEO, Calif. -- Mark Logic Corporation, provider of the industry's leading XML content server, today announced that the University of Virginia Press is using the MarkLogic Server as the platform underlying The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, an online academic research tool available at http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/dmde.

The Dolley Madison Digital Edition is the first-ever complete publication of all of Dolley Payne Madison's correspondence. The most important First Lady of the nineteenth century Dolley Madison was a prolific note and letter writer. Her correspondence provides scholars, students, and anyone interested in American history a powerful snapshot of the creation of the federal government and life in early 19th century America. When complete, the Dolley Madison Digital Edition will have involved the research, technical markup, and conversion of more than 2500 handwritten manuscripts, the vast majority of them previously unpublished in any form.

"The launch of The Dolley Madison Digital Edition represents an important event in scholarly publishing by enabling deep access to historical information and knowledge, fundamentally improving the way scholars conduct research," said the University of Virginia Press's electronic imprint manager Mark H. Saunders. "Mark Logic's XML technology presents a tremendous opportunity for academic publishers to enhance scholarly communication by establishing self-sustaining programs that generate new sources of cost recovery and fund future scholarly projects."

Mark Logic Helps to Unlock History for Scholars Worldwide

The first installment of The Dolley Madison Digital Edition contains over 700 letters, through June 1836, with some 1800 additional letters to follow in periodic updates. Archived in XML, the Digital Edition offers a powerful selection of search tools, allowing users to perform simple or advanced searches by period, correspondent, topic, or place. The letters may also be accessed directly through a comprehensive, sortable list or read in chronological order. Each letter appears with a summary, plus crosslinks to related letters and glossary entries for personal names and titles. An invaluable resource in itself, the extensive glossary identifies more than 1,000 people and books referred to in the letters, providing a unique biographical view on the elites of the early Republic. The glossary also identifies places, and eventually will include even the ships on which Dolley Madison embarked, to set each letter in the most accurate context possible.

"We are thrilled to have a premier scholarly institution such as the University of Virginia Press successfully implement our platform to support such an important and historic project," said Paul Pedersen, co-founder and chief technologist for Mark Logic.

"Technology has long tantalized historians with promises for the future. The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, the first offering from the University of Virginia Press's Electronic Imprint, makes good on all those promises. . . This is the future and it looks good!" said Catherine Allgor, professor at the University of California at Riverside, and author of Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government

About the University of Virginia Press

The University of Virginia Press (formerly named the University Press of Virginia) was founded in 1963 to advance the intellectual interests not only of the University of Virginia, but of institutions of higher learning throughout the state. A member of the Association of American University Presses, UVaP currently publishes fifty to sixty new titles annually. New titles are approved by the Board of Directors after a rigorous process of peer review. The UVaP editorial program focuses primarily on the humanities and social sciences with special concentrations in American history, African American studies, southern studies, literature, ecocriticism, and regional books. While it continuously pursues new titles, UVaP also maintains a backlist of over 1,000 titles in print.

Active series include the Papers of George Washington; the Papers of James Madison; the Victorian Literature and Culture Series; CARAF Books (translations of Francophone literature); the Carter G. Woodson Institute Series in Black Studies; Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism; The American South Series; A Nation Divided: New Studies in the Civil War; Constitutionalism and Democracy; Studies in Religion and Culture; and the Virginia Bookshelf series of regional reprints. For more information please visit http://www.upress.virginia.edu/

Rotunda is published by the Press's Electronic Imprint, which is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the President's Office of the University of Virginia.

About Mark Logic Corporation

Mark Logic Corporation is the provider of the industry's leading XML content server. Mark Logic works with providers of information products to accelerate new product creation, deliver products through multiple channels, integrate content from different sources, repurpose content into multiple products, build custom publishing systems, and mine content to find previously undiscovered information. MarkLogic Server does this by enabling companies to query, manipulate, and render XML content using the W3C-standard XQuery language. Designed for high performance and scalability, MarkLogic Server can deliver millisecond response times against multi-terabyte contentbases. Mark Logic is privately held and backed by Sequoia Capital and Lehman Brothers. For more information, please visit www.marklogic.com.