History on the web

The recent focus on the Supreme Court and nominees may not seem like it has much to do with IT, but yesterday a friend pointed me to an interesting project that aims to create and maintain a "complete, reliable, easy-to-use and fully searchable online database of original source materials for the United States Constitution."  The project, called ConSource is just getting started, but the goals are laudable.   Many people believe that the  framer's intent is important in determining what the constitution means, but most of those same people don't really have anything more than a sketchy idea regarding that intent.  Creating a repository of source material is the first step to enabling more lively and intelligent debate on the issue.