For more than twenty years, A Guide to Documentary Editing has proven an invaluable tool for scholarly editors, editors-in-training, readers of documentary editions, and other students of American history and literature. This new, extensively revised edition of the Guide arrives in the midst of great change in the field. In addition to exploring fully the increasingly central role electronic technology plays in the editing process, this edition provides the most current treatment of the craft's fundamental issues. These include locating and collecting sources, transcribing source texts, conventions of textual treatment, dealing with nontextual elements, and preparing editions for publishers. The documentary-editing environment is more vibrant than ever, and the authors draw on this wealth of activity to include numerous examples of the Guide's principles in practice. Each edition of the Guide has become the standard text for scholarly editors, whether their focus is correspondence, journals, diaries, financial records, professional papers, or unpublished manuscripts. --Publisher description.