Presidential Address--New Editorial Futures for the Past

Documentary Editing has served the association well since 1979 as a print journal, but it has run into the familiar problems of a print journal with a limited circulation and ever-increasing costs for paper, printing, and mailing. There have also been problems in having a lack of continuity in the position of editor. The association owes many thanks to the publications committee, and in particular to Ron Bosco and Rich Leffler for their recent work as co-editors. Bosco and Leffler agreed to serve for two years, and with time slipping away we needed new leadership. Luckily Amanda Gailey and Andrew Jewell stepped forward with a plan to succeed them in editing the journal. Essentially, they proposed an open access online journal that could reach a much Documentary Editing 32 116 larger audience. Gailey and Jewell plan to continue with all of the content that people are accustomed to in our journal, but they also will add a new feature by making available space for small-scale peer-reviewed digital editions. This development holds promise of promoting both editing and the accompanying analysis of the text. As we know, peer review is not as well established for digital publication as it is for print, and by providing a venue for peer reviewed digital editing the ADE is taking not a responsive but a proactive role in helping to advance editing in a medium with an extraordinary power to enrich the work we do. It is precisely because some of the problems associated with digital scholarship have yet to be resolved that our organization should be working in this area. One of the key intellectual tasks of our generation, it seems to me, is to harness the power of the electronic medium