The original Lincoln Letters and Documents are located at the Detroit Public Library, Burton Historical Collection. Digital reproductions of all documents have been created.
In 2005, Wayne State University's Library & Information Science Program was awarded the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) "Recruiting and Educating Librarians for the 21st Century" grant. This funding aimed to recruit and train librarians, with theory and practical internships at local institutions, in the field of digital librarianship. The letters and documents were transcribed by Sean Rouse and the website built by Anna Fast, both participants in the program where they were supervised by Cheri Gay and Mark Bowden. The website design was based on a website developed by Mignon Camara, Akilah Wood and Cassandra James.
Images were scanned by The Papers of Abraham Lincoln Project at a 600 dpi resolution, 24-bit color, and saved as unaltered TIFFs. The scans were resized to 600 pixels on the long edge and saved at 72 dpi for public access on the web.
The Dublin Core format was used for metadata, and all subject headings are compliant with the OCLC authority file or AACRII rules. Metadata entry was done in Hyperion, the digital management database of Sirsi-Dynix.