The University of Delaware Library Digital Collections has added three new collections to its Web site. All three of the collections relate to the Civil War, and they’re all letter collections.

The Edward A Fulton Collection contains 39 letters, mostly written between Edward Fulton and his mother. The David Lilley Letters consist of 37 letters mostly written between David Lilley and his sister over a four-year span. Finally, the Thomas Reynolds Letters were written to Louisa Seward and include letters, poems, and an invoice for medical equipment (!!)

The collections are presented in a framed page; the list of letters on the left. (There are few enough letters in each collection that this is not unwieldy.) Click a letter and it appears on the right as an scan of the original document. If you want to read a transcript (though I was surprised how easy the originals were to read) use the pull-down menu over the list of letters. Choose “Page & Text” and click Go. You’ll get a pop-up button with the transcript (it took me a few minutes to figure this out.) While browsing the original images you can zoom in, paginate, and get referring URLs.

Nice collections!