The directors of Livingstone Online (Adrian S. Wisnicki and Megan Ward) are delighted to announce the end of LEAP: the Livingstone Online Enrichment and Access Project (2013-2017) after four years, three months, and eleven days of development.
This project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), led to the full redevelopment of the Livingstone Online website, a major expansion of our digital collection, and the addition of a full-scale critical edition of Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865-73), an edition comprising some 2,000 manuscript pages covering every aspect of David Livingstone’s final travels in Africa.
Indeed, the directors of Livingstone Online take great pleasure in marking the end of the LEAP with the release of the second edition of the new Livingstone Online, one full edition more than promised in the grant application.

The new edition of Livingstone Online represents a major overhaul of the first edition (August 2016) and is leaps and bounds beyond the beta edition (June 2015). Some of the highlights include:
- a full retheming, which has streamlined the site’s appearance and made it much faster and easier to maintain on the back end;
- the release of the Livingstone Online Instruction Manual — nearly 350 pages with 300 screenshots that document every staff-side workflow needed to maintain the site;
- a full-scale revision of our metadata records, which now encompass nearly 3000 items;
- a major expansion of our encoded transcriptions to 780 files, covering every facet of Livingstone’s career;
- the release of our final batch of manuscript images, bringing the total published by the site to 15,000 images (including 3,200 spectral images), representing 1,300 unique items;
- the complete integration into the site of our critical edition of Livingstone’s Final Manuscripts (1865-73) and our multispectral critical editions of the 1870 and 1871 Field Diaries plus the Letter from Bambarre;
- a new peer-reviewed essay on Reading Exploration Through the Digital Library;
- an experimental Browse by Location page (loads slowly);
- and much more.
To glimpse the scale of the new Livingstone Online, users are encouraged to start with our site guide, which provides a skeletal outline of the entire site.
The directors of the LEAP are grateful to the many individuals and institutions that have made this project possible. We encourage everyone to visit the site at their leisure and explore!
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