development of documentary editing as a discipline allows for more faithful renditions of the texts. And in the nearly 60 years since the publication of Collected Works, many new Lincoln documents have been discovered, providing new opportunities for historical scholarship. With these reasons likely in mind, Lincoln biographer David Herbert Donald assessed, "Though Roy Basler and his associates did an excellent job of editing Lincoln's writings a generation ago, I believe that it is time for a new, complete, updated edition of his works." Project purpose and history From 1985 to 2000, the Lincoln Legal Papers searched county, state, and federal records for documents relating to legal cases handled by Lincoln or his partnerships. Images of more than 96,000 documents, arranged by case, were published in DVD-ROM format as The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Complete Documentary Edition (University of Illinois Press, 2000). In 2009, that publication went online as The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln: Second Edition. It features all of the documents from the DVD edition, plus an additional 45 cases, 12 non-litigation activities, and nearly 1,300 new documents, as well as updated color images of more than 1,500 documents, many written by Lincoln. The selective 4-volume print edition of this series, The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases (University of Virginia Press, 2008), provides transcribed and annotated documents from 65 of Lincoln's most significant and representative cases, with additional chapters documenting his travels on the Eighth Judicial Circuit and other aspects of Lincoln’s life as a lawyer. In 2001, the Lincoln Legal Papers was expanded beyond Lincoln’s legal practice and transformed into The Papers of Abraham Lincoln. The project is a department within the Research Division of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. Beginning in 2003, teams of researchers visited private and public repositories around the U.S. and in several foreign countries, searching for, identifying, and scanning thousands of documents. The Papers of Abraham Lincoln has identified over 70,000 documents written by and to Lincoln in repositories and collections around the world. The major purpose of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln is "to preserve all of Lincoln's correspondence (both incoming and outgoing) and speeches with digital images, to provide authoritative transcriptions of those documents, to offer historical context for each document through annotation, and to make the images and transcriptions freely available over the Internet." In 2003, Richard Norton Smith, presidential historian and founding