Wed. Nov 20th, 2024

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin gestures during a Nov. 19, 2024, press conference at his Little Rock office. Griffin announced he will fund $1 million for a partnership with the University of Arkansas to digitize historical documents related to the state constitution. From left to right: State Historian David Ware; Nicholas Cole, director of Oxford University’s Quill Project; Rodney Harris, assistant history professor at Williams Baptist University; Attorney General Tim Griffin; UA Chancellor Charles Robinson; Howard Britt, former state Supreme Court chief justice, Cynthia Nance, dean of the UA School of Law; Lindsey Gustafson, associate dean of academic affairs for the UA Little Rock Bowen School of Law; Jason Battles, dean of University Libraries. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)

Attorney General Tim Griffin is setting aside $1 million to fund a partnership with the University of Arkansas to digitize historical documents related to the state constitution, he announced Tuesday.

Correspondence, journals and proceedings about the Arkansas Constitution are examples of documents that will be digitized as part of the project. Some content is expected to be online as early as next year, but the collection will continue to grow in the coming years as more documents are discovered and digitized.

Jason Battles, dean of the University of Arkansas libraries, will lead the effort to digitize historical documents related to the state’s constitution as part of a partnership with the attorney general’s office. He spoke at a Nov. 19, 2024, press conference in Little Rock about the process ahead. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)

While unrestricted settlement funds from Griffin’s office are funding the partnership, the University of Arkansas will take the lead on the digitizing efforts with Jason Battles, dean of University Libraries, at the helm. The content is expected to be shared with Oxford University’s Quill Project, an online collection of similar historical documents from about a dozen other states.

“We not only need to get our house in order and get these documents digitized and searchable for us, but after that is done, we need to link it to this broader research database where you can search constitutions regionally, nationally,” Griffin said during Tuesday’s announcement in which he was joined by a number of people who will be involved in the partnership. 

Completion of the digitization process is one that officials were unable to corral into an explicit timeline on Tuesday. Battles said he already has plans to digitize microfilm, newspapers, and proceedings that the university has on hand.

But the digitization process is more than just scanning documents. Battles said a team will work with computers that can read handwriting, and each entry will likely also include a description to provide more context and aid in the searchable feature.

We should not go another generation talking about how much we admire and revere our constitution and leave this work undone.

– Attorney General Tim Griffin

Ideally, Arkansas-specific content would also be uploaded to an app that lawyers, educators and the general public can easily access, Griffin said.

“I don’t want my attorneys, this office, opining on what the constitution says or doesn’t say, means or doesn’t mean, without all of the available research,” Griffin said. “And there’s a lot of research that’s available that you just can’t access.”

Nicholas Cole (center), a senior research fellow and director of Oxford University’s Quill Project, attends a press conference in Little Rock on Nov. 19, 2024. He is joined by State Historian David Ware (left) and Rodney Harris, an assistant professor of history at Williams Baptist University. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)

Howard Brill, former state Supreme Court chief justice and current professor at the UA School of Law, shared similar sentiments about access and said the digitized information will benefit students examining the constitution and judges who are ruling on the document’s specifics.

Nicholas Cole, a senior research fellow at Oxford University and director of the Quill Project, said that the state’s documents will also help to better understand what Arkansas’ state motto — “Regnat populus,” which translates to “the people rule” in English — means in practice.

Cole, who is British, said the state-specific documents also serve an international purpose as a resource for officials who are writing constitutions.

Tuesday’s press conference featured several historical documents, which State Historian David Ware presented with care. Among the weathered pages was a 200-year old treaty between the United States and the Quapaw Nation. A telegram involving former President Abraham Lincoln was also on display.

Arkansas State Historian David Ware presents historical documents from the State Archives during a press conference on Nov. 19, 2024. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)

Ware said he was “honored” to be a part of the plan to digitize the documents, and said the papers supporting the different versions of the Arkansas Constitution will shed light into the minds of those who drafted them.

Though the state archives hold a collection of some of the relevant documents to the project, Ware said he knows there is more out there in residents’ homes that are “hopefully going to fall into our hands someday.”

University of Arkansas Chancellor Charles Robinson speaks positively about a partnership with the attorney general’s office to digitize documents related to the state constitution on Nov. 19, 2024. Howard Britt, former state Supreme Court Chief Justice, looks on. (Mary Hennigan/Arkansas Advocate)

“The great challenge is giving access to what’s in our collections,” Ware said. “This gives us an opportunity to [provide] that access.”

UA Chancellor Charles Robinson said making the content available will support historical literacy as well as legal scholars and their understanding of the constitutional era.

“I have worked with some of these documents in my research [as a historian], and the idea of having them digitized is just fascinating and thrilling to me because I know that it will expedite and enhance understanding of this critical time in Arkansas history and American history.”

Griffin emphasized his excitement and the energy coming from those involved in the partnership.

“We should not go another generation talking about how much we admire and revere our constitution and leave this work undone,” Griffin said. “Because in that case, our actions do not line up with our words. If we really care about our state’s constitution, if we care about what it means, we’ve got to do this.”

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