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Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler, is an historically significant, seven volume compilation of U.S. treaties, laws and executive orders pertaining to Native American Indian tribes. The volumes cover U.S. Government treaties with Native Americans from 1778-1883 (Volume II) and U.S. laws and executive orders concerning Native Americans from 1871-1970 (Volumes I, III-VII). The work was first published in 1903-04 by the U.S. Government Printing Office. Enhanced by the editors' use of margin notations and a comprehensive index, the information contained in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties is in high demand by Native peoples, researchers, journalists, attorneys, legislators, teachers and others of both Native and non-Native origins.
Project Overview
In May 1996, the AMIGOS Bibliographic Council awarded the Oklahoma State University Library a $1,500 grant to convert 150 pages of text from Volume II (Treaties) of Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties compiled and edited by Charles J. Kappler to a digital format, maintaining as much as possible the appearance and intent of the original work while allowing for enhanced access including full-text indexing. These pages include all of the pre-removal treaties of the Five Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole. These tribes were chosen because of their significance to the state of Oklahoma.
In September 1999, the Library received word from the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola Foundation that it would be the recipient of a $25,000 grant to continue work on Indian Affairs. The Library contracted a data conversion company to scan and mark up the remaining text from Volume II and continue with Volumes I and III. The text was tagged in SGML using a modified version of the TEI Lite DTD. The Electronic Publishing Center Staff converted the text to HTML for presentation on the web. Images of the pages were saved in the archival TIFF format.
In 2001, the Electronic Publishing Center received $20,000 from the Angie Debo estate to complete the digitization of volumes IV-VII. Dr. Debo, a noted Oklahoma historian, had bequeathed ... to the OSU Library Special Collections. To learn more about Angie Debo, please visit the SCUA website . By the time of the second phase of the Kappler project, the Electronic Publshing Center was established, and had the staff, equipment, and expertise to accomplish the work entirely in house. Student workers in the EPC scanned the four volumes, converted the image files to machine-readable text using optical character recognition (OCR) software, and prepared derivative JPEG images of each page for display on the web. The digitized text was marked up in XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) using the TEIxLite DTD, and was converted to HTML for display on the web using XSL style sheets prepared by the Electronic Publishing Librarian. The final volumes went online in June 2003.
Volumes I through VII are available on the web both as fully searchable digitized text and as page images. The contents may be accessed from the Table of Contents or Index of each volume or through keyword searching.
Questions and comments to:
OSU Library Electronic Publishing Center: lib-dig@okstate.edu
Produced by the Oklahoma State University Library, 1999-2000.
Generous support provided by The Coca-Cola Foundation, Atlanta, GA and the AMIGOS Bibliographic Council, Inc.
URL: http://digital.library.okstate.edu/kappler/intro.html