Einstein documents digitization project complete

Anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can now explore more than 80,000 pages of documents left behind by the world's most famous physics genius, Albert Einstein.

The now-complete Digital Einstein project -- the online phase of the Einstein Papers project and a collaboration between Princeton University Press and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (to whom the scientist bequeathed his intellectual legacy) -- is nearly two decades in the making. Researchers began sorting through the physicist's letters, papers, postcards, notebooks and diaries in 1986.

The online documents correspond with a series of physical books, The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, previously released by Princeton University Press. The more than 5,000 searchable online documents, available in German and English, cover Einstein's life through his 1921 Nobel prize in physics.

"We want to make everything accessible to a much wider audience than just the scholars, historians, physicists and philosophers," Diana Kormos-Buchwald, director of the Einstein Papers project, told The Guardian. "It's been a challenge to get all the material online, but I'm extremely thrilled that we have succeeded."

Additional documents will be uploaded over time as additional volumes are printed by Princeton.

"We've been working on it for a while, and we've been thinking about it for a long time," Kormos-Buchwald told Inside Higher Education. "Only now do we have a fantastic colleague like [Princeton University Press's] Kenneth Reed who could make it so that it could be standardized and authorized and correct."