Mike Kelly, head of the archives at Amherst, writes on the archive’s blog about the open access Digital Dickinson housed within the library’s larger digital collection known as ACDC, “we are delighted to announce that all of the manuscripts of Emily Dickinson held by Amherst College are now freely available for viewing by anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world.” Kelly tells us that the manuscripts are organized by “Amherst College numbers—simple inventory numbers that enable us to retrieve the original manuscripts when they are requested.” He continues, “beyond simply searching for individual poems, you can retrieve subsets of manuscripts by searching for phrases such as “Johnson letters” or “Franklin”. My favorite search is “Prose fragment” — a category Johnson included in his 1958 edition of The Letters of Emily Dickinson. One strength of the Amherst College Dickinson Collection is that we hold many fragments and drafts that provide a wealth of information about Dickinson’s writing process.
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