The dictionary will provide a valuable lexical resource for comparative research, be it in diachronic reconstruction or in synchronic morphosyntactic typology. The inclusion of extensive documentation of pre-contact cultural and technological terminology makes the manuscript of special value to archaeological and anthropological researchers as well. And as speakers of Penobscot and other Eastern Abenaki dialects are central players in colonial-era history of the Northeast, this dictionary (particularly when combined with Siebert's Penobscot Legends text collection; see below) offers an unparalleled entrée into Native-language accounts and related narratives of this period and beyond. The manuscript is digitized and held in that form by the American Philosophical Society (APS), along with a dot-matrix printout of the 1988 draft that also includes Siebert’s subsequent handwritten amendments. The project will convert the digital manuscript’s original ASCII-based replacive font encoding of special phonetic characters and diacritics to Unicode plaintext, archiving original and intermediately processed versions for historical and backup reference. An archivally robust XML-based database version will be produced from this foundation, edited for manuscript errors, and expanded with new vocabulary and examples of usage added from Siebert’s original field notes as well as several other lexicographic sources. From this database Penobscot/English and English/Penobscot dictionaries will be generated and published in both print (through the University of Maine Press) and web-based form, with copies of the database and other materials archived at the American Philosophical Society, the Penobscot Nation Cultural and Historic Preservation Department, and the University of Maine. This dictionary manuscript is the core lexicographic resource for the heritage language community's revitalization program, and indeed this project began as a proposal from Penobscot elders and language workers to the American Philosophical Society to recover and revise this resource into its complete, community-usable form. With both academic and heritage community users in mind, we see current and future interoperability with other resources and long-term archival stability as the primary goals of this project. Hence the core database will be structured according to standard documentary linguistic best practices for data: a semantically transparent and structurally minimalist XML database coded in Unicode plaintext. This format offers us the foundation for reliable long-term accessibility of the resource, even as it provides maximal flexibility for presentation and development.