Selection Policies

Because of United States copyright laws, generally only works published before January 1, 1923 were selected for the project. A number of works published by the United States government and by the State of Georgia after 1923 are in the public domain and were included. When an original copy of a work in the public domain was not readily available, exact reprints (but not later editions) were used as source material.

In the selection process, emphasis was placed on the following areas:

• Biographies, particularly directories
• History
• Literature
• Works important to the development of Georgia's culture

Particular attention was paid to ensuring representation of groups such as women, African-Americans, and Native Americans.

The selection of titles for the Georgia Historic Books Project began with the creation of a list based on the shelflist of the Georgiana Collection of the University of Georgia Libraries Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The Georgiana Collection's feature monographic works that are selected according to the following criteria:

• Works about the actions or influences of Georgia's people, institutions and organizations;
• Works about the state as a geographical or political setting;
• Works written by "Georgians" -- individual authors or organizations whose life or work is identified with the culture of the state by scholarly research.

More information on the Georgiana Collection may be found at the Georgiana Collection Web site.

Additional works were added to this list, and the titles were prioritized using the following bibliographies on Georgia history and literature:

• Simpson, John Eddins. Georgia History: A Bibliography Compiled by John Eddins Simpson. Metuchen (Nj.): The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1976

• Larwood, James. Georgia 1800-1900: a Series of Selections from the Georgiana Library of James Larwood. Atlanta (Ga.): Atlanta Public Library, 1956

• Price, Michael E. Stories with a Moral: Literature and Society in Nineteenth-Century Georgia. Athens (Ga.): The University of Georgia Press, 2000

A number of scholars also reviewed the list of proposed titles and made recommendations.

Editorial Policies

• All unambiguous end-of-line hyphens have been removed

• Errors in the original printed text such as misprintings and misspellings have been retained and noted where possible

• Corrections and normalizations are represented by editorial TEI SGML elements and appear here within green brackets

• Notes which originally appeared in the margin or elsewhere in the printed text appear here at the bottom of the page, see page image for original location

• Long "f" characters used for "s" in some 18th century printing have been emended without notation. For example "Houfe" as printed is rendered as "House." See page image for original printing style.

• In imaging, all blank unnumbered pages have been removed. Repeated exposures in microfilm have been removed: When image only, the best reproduction was slected; When image and text, the exposure with the best text reproduction was selected. Blank flyleafs, bookplates, blank endpapers, and the like were not imaged.