Peters, a political science instructor at Citrus College (California) who is passionate about studying the presidency, is co-creator of the American Presidency Project, the largest online archive of presidential documents, data related to the presidency and audio and video clips of presidential rhetoric.

"My interest had its genesis in the years 1979 through 1981. I can clearly remember the stark differences in leadership style exhibited by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan when I was a child," Peters said.

The idea for the project originated when Peters was approached by John Woolley, Peter’s collaborator on the project and political science department chair at the University of California at Santa Barbara, to design a small, instructional Web site for his upper division course on the American presidency.

"It began in a very modest form in 1999 with just Inaugural and State of the Union addresses," Peter said.

But the project has evolved. Peters poured more than 6,000 hours of his own time into making the site what it is today. The work includes uploading more than 85,000 documents from presidents’ public papers, from presidents Washington to Bush.

Peters has done all of the Web and database design work for the project, including providing graphics and Web coding. The structure of the database, while not obvious to most visitors to the Web site, is quite complex, Peters said.

"I have attempted to break down what seems like a monolithic chunk of presidential communications into segmented and carefully classified pieces," he said.

Peters feels that the database design is valuable because he has classified tens of thousands of presidential documents into distinct categories.

"Many of these documents are not available anywhere else on the Internet and many presidential libraries refer to our Web site for online research," Peters said. "We receive 4,000 to 10,000 unique visitors per day from almost every country in the world."

Solely responsible for the maintenance of the online resource, Peters adds new content on a weekly basis.

"The American Presidency Project is a resource used for both scholarly research and instructional enhancement," he said.

According to Peters, the Web site was used as an authoritative source of material during the 2004 presidential campaign by supporters of both President Bush and his Democratic opponent Sen. John Kerry. It will also play a key role as the U.S. transitions to a new presidency, he said.

"Once President Bush leaves office next year, all of his documents that are currently available on the White House Web site will disappear," Peters said. "It will probably be three to four years before the Bush Library Web site is fully operational. Until that time, the American Presidency Project will be the only online source for Bush’s documents."

The relevancy of the project will become even more significant as Election Day 2008 nears and Peters extends its scope further.

"Besides serving as an instructional and research resource, we have ambitious plans to expand our collection of documents to include presidential candidate remarks from 2008 and prior years," he said.

There are other plans for the project.

"We are working on agreements with various organizations to expand our offerings and branch out into producing printed reference works, aside from the two volumes we produced with Congressional Quarterly Press," he said. "Eventually, we would like to begin sponsoring academic conferences and speakers’ series."

For the time being, the project, which receives no funding, will continue to be run through volunteer efforts under the umbrella of the University of California at Santa Barbara.

As its director, Peters receives numerous requests for expert commentary and data from the news media. Prior to the last three State of the Union addresses, Peters assisted the Associated Press, Los Angeles Times and other organizations with information. In 2007, he was the guest commentator on Voice of America the morning following the State of the Union.

Recently, the project was featured on the BBC’s "The World Today" and the Voice of America’s "Our World." It was also mentioned in the Los Angeles Times.

With this type of exposure, Peters is making a name for himself and Citrus College.

"Naturally, I always have them introduce me as an instructor at Citrus College," he said.

Visit the American Presidency Project at www.presidency.ucsb.edu.