For those of you unfamiliar or unaware... Steve and Danny are referring to two internet sites which have the Official Records online.

The full title of what are known commonly as the 'Official Records' or just the 'ORs' is:

The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies

They were published in the 1890s by the War Department through the Government Printing Office.

The two sites mentioned are eHistory at Ohio State University and Making of America (MOA) at Cornell Univerity Library. As Danny mentions, eHistory displays in text format which is convenient for 'cutting and pasting'. MOA (Cornell) shows the images of the pages but will also convert to text. The quality of the OCR (optical charater recognition) conversion to text is much better on eHistory than MOA.

My preference is the more flexible "boolean search" feature on MOA. I also find the scanned images easier on the eyes for reading from the computer screen. If there is a passage I want to 'cut and paste', I note the series, volume, and page on the MOA site and then jump over to eHistory, find the passage, and cut and paste the text.

The two sites are located at:

Making of America
http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/moa/moa_browse.html

eHistory
http://ehistory.osu.edu/osu/sources/records/