We are pleased to announce the release of 4,180 texts from the second phase of our Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) project. These texts were produced in collaboration with ProQuest, and are available immediately to EEBO-TCP Phase II partners.
The entire EEBO-TCP archive is now available–anyone may search, browse, and explore the corpus. Access to the full text of EEBO-TCP digital editions is restricted to partner institutions for a limited period – about 10 years from their initial release – as per our agreement with ProQuest. However, all TCP-created titles will eventually enter the public domain, and will be freely available to scholars, researchers, and readers everywhere, in keeping with the University of Michigan Library’s commitment to the creation of open access cultural heritage archives.
We are still accepting new library partners for EEBO-TCP Phase II. Partners jointly fund the creation of new texts, and so have a direct impact on the success of the project. The production of new texts is ongoing, and semi-annual updates will be made to the corpus over the course of the project.
The first phase of EEBO-TCP produced 25,355 texts, and our second phase aims to create transcriptions of each unique text remaining in ProQuest’s EEBO database, adding 44,000 more books to the EEBO-TCP archive. The creation of accurately keyed, searchable, standards-compliant digital editions from scanned images of centuries-old books is a boon to students and scholars. These early printed books cannot be accurately captured by optical character recognition (OCR) software, and therefore require individual keying and encoding.Since 1999, the TCP, consisting of staff at the University of Michigan and the University of Oxford, has collaborated with scholars, commercial publishers, and university libraries to produce scholar-ready (that is, TEI-compliant, SGML/XML enhanced) text editions of works from digital image collections, including EEBO, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) from Gale, and Evans Early American Imprint from Readex.
More than 125 libraries participate in the TCP, as does the Joint Information Systems (JISC) Collections, which represents many British libraries and educational institutions.
To learn more about our work, visit www.lib.umich.edu/tcp. Questions, comments, and inquiries may be directed to Ari Friedlander, Outreach Coordinator, at tcp-info [at] umich [dot] edu.