The Julian Bond Papers Project is an innovative digital project that seeks not only to make the life’s work of Civil Rights icon Julian Bond freely available to the public but also to render accessible the editorial process to community historians, crowdsourced transcriptionists, and student apprentices. Julian Bond was a trusted voice in American democracy throughout his life, which spanned seven decades and significant historical moments like the U.S. Civil Rights era, school desegregation, the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, the movement for Gay Rights, and the environmental movement. The Julian Bond Papers Project plans to catalog, transcribe, annotate, and publish Bond’s collection over approximately two decades, while implementing a crowdsourced transcription process that has created over 10,000 pages to-date, including work from annual Charlottesville transcription events. The project also establishes editorial apprenticeships to teach students digital skills and model alternate-academic career options. The project will use these strategies to publish the majority of the Bond Papers, housed at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library and including 11 series, 1641 folders, and 47,000 items.

The project begins with the publication of Series 1, Bond’s speeches and articles, in raw (single-verified, unannotated), freely available digital transcriptions, and will proceed with subsequent content sets focused on his audiovisual materials, correspondence, academic and political papers, and family collections, to the eventual publication of a free and completely annotated digital edition. Finally, the project will publish a three-volume thematically organized print series called “The Essential Julian Bond.”