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This site provides a collection of approximately 400 items or 2,000 digital files from each of the 64 inaugurations from George Washington’s in 1789 to George W. Bush’s inauguration of 2001, and will include items from the 64th inauguration of 2009. This presentation includes diaries and letters of presidents and of those who witnessed inaugurations, handwritten drafts of inaugural addresses, broadsides, inaugural tickets and programs, prints, photographs, and sheet music. Additional material has been included from the photography collections of the Architect of the Capitol, the White House, and the United States Senate Office of the Sergeant at Arms. Some items, from records of early sessions of Congress to early films, that are already online in American Memory have been incorporated.

An important component is the collaboration with the Avalon Project at the Yale Law School, which permits the site to offer Yale’s online presentations of the inaugural addresses from Presidents Washington to Bush with associated searchable text transcriptions. A key objective of this online presentation is to make accessible to the public, before the inauguration of the next president, many of the treasures and other important primary source materials held by the Library of Congress as well as by other institutions. The collection has been organized chronologically by presidential inauguration and an effort has been made to offer a balanced number of items for each inaugural event.