Transcribed by hand, owned by libraries, made for everyone: EEBO-TCP in 2012

Abstract

The Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) has now been working continuously for more than 12 years to produce accurate encoded text versions of the books represented as facsimile page images in Early English Books Online. To date, we’ve produced more than 45,000 texts, working toward the goal of producing one edition of each English-language work represented in EEBO — around 70,000 works in all.

This presentation will review EEBO-TCP’s unique organizational structure and business model, describing the challenges and benefits of working closely with a commercial publisher and with our many supporting partner libraries. In addition, I will give an overview of the EEBO-TCP production workflow: where do the texts come from, where do they go (and where might they go), and what does it all cost?

In the dozen years that EEBO-TCP has been working steadily through the EEBO corpus, there has been significant development in the available tools, support, and opportunities for working with electronic text — many of which we will learn about throughout the conference. In other words, the landscape in which EEBO-TCP was born has changed dramatically, leading to new challenges and opportunities for our work. This update will conclude by describing some of these, with the aim of opening a discussion that will continue, in some form or another, throughout the conference.