The Louisiana State Museum's Colonial Documents Collection

Abstract

The Louisiana State Museum's Louisiana Historical Center holds approximately thirty thousand French Superior Council and Spanish Judicial Colonial Documents. These documents contain quotidian details about life in the colonial Atlantic, showcase the judicial and legal structure of the French and Spanish colonies, and place the colonies within the context of developing global political and economic structures. The only existing indexes of the Colonial Documents were created in the first half of the twentieth century and are incomplete. This is in large part a consequence of cultural, social and political constructions that informed the processes of conservators, translators and scholars. However, an ongoing, collaborative initiative entitled The Louisiana Colonial Documents Digitization Project (LCDDP) aims to preserve the hundreds of thousands of individual pages from these records to culminate in an online, newly-indexed, comprehensive database that will be accessible internationally and free of charge. This article demonstrates how the LCDDP, in addition to digitally preserving manuscripts, provides solutions to technical and historiographical issues presented by current indexes as well as physical limitations of the collection. This article also examines the LCDDP for its limitations vis à vis access and conservation as well as its relationship to new research based on current trends and theories in Atlantic World research.