EEBO-TCP: Measuring Impact and Making Changes

1. EEBO-TCP: Measuring Impact and Making Changes Judith Siefring Digital Editor, Bodleian Libraries Monday 8 July 2013

2. What is EEBO-TCP? EEBO-TCP creates XML-encoded, searchable editions of books printed in England or in English in the period 1473-1700. The TCP is a partnership between the Universities of Oxford and Michigan and the commercial publisher ProQuest. The main interface is ProQuest’s EEBO: http://eebo.chadwyck.com

3. Using TIDSR • Quantitative • analytics, • bibliometrics, • Web 2.0 analysis, • in-depth online user survey • Qualitative • three focus groups • a conference • individual interviews • email discussion Siefring, Judith and Meyer, Eric T., Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition: Report on the TIDSR Benchmarking Study (2013). London: JISC, March 2013. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2236202 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2236202 EEBO-TCP profile, user needs, potential for future development, identifying strands of work, applying for additional funding

4. How to improve sustainability? Preservation of data set Ongoing support for project personnel Improve awareness of resource amongst the user community Meet needs/desires of users Make the data easily available in multiple formats Provide easily accessible documentation and metadata Offer user and teaching guides Make citation easy Develop relationships with other projects Develop funding bids to improve or enhance the corpus

5. Awareness of other resources

6. TCP profile Survey respondents who said they had used EEBO texts (either by themselves or in conjunction with images) at least occasionally were asked if, before completing the survey, they had heard of EEBO-TCP, and whether they were aware that EEBO-TCP creates the full texts available on the main EEBO site:

7. Improving our profile February: 438 tweets/1321followers July: 522 tweets/1748 followers Guest blog posts Outreach events, e.g. conferences Developing relationships and collaborations

8. What do users want? Better quality transcriptions Completeness/comprehensiveness of coverage Links to other resources e.g. ESTC Easily accessible texts in multiple formats Free open access to images and text Richer tagging

9. Better quality transcriptions Textual Genomics, a proposal led by Sussex University, currently under consideration by the AHRC’s Digital Transformations funding strand Crowdsourcing corrections to the EEBO-TCP data

10. Encoding and metadata P5 compliance Sebastian Rahtz and James Cummings, “Kicking and Screaming: Challenges and advantages of bringing TCP texts into line with the Text Encoding Initiative”. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3Af9667884-220b-4ec9-bb2f-c79044302399 Metadata in TEI header format Shelfmark data? We hope so! Links to the ESTC records? Yes.

11. Easy access in multiple formats An EEBO-TCP hub offering easy-to-download texts in multiple formats: plain text, ePub, XML, etc. Oxford Text Archive, http://www.ota.ox.ac.uk/ Extendable; multiple versions from multiple sources

12. Digital citation How do (or would) you cite materials from EEBO-TCP? General solutions • Publicizing the issue. • Making citation easy. • Incentivizing citation. • Dating digital items. • Interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. • Respected institutions leading change. • Make URLs as short as possible and, if possible, human-decodable. • Include a clear link to a citation from the main page of a text, image, etc. • Encourage/guide users always to give a date of access whenever they cite a digital resource, and include such a date in automatically generated citations. • Provide easily accessible editorial documentation at the point of accessing texts and images (rather than solely on project – descriptive websites). • Digital content creators should consider how best to raise and develop the scholarly reputation of their resource, and promote that resource accordingly. • Where content (such as, from 2015, EEBO-TCP Phase One texts) is in the public domain and not tied to one point of access, citation information should be tied to individual texts (perhaps by including a citation in the TEI header, if possible).

13. Documentation Editorial guidelines User guides Publicity materials • I originally used the microfilms. :) • probably as a trial of the uni library, maybe plugged by faculty members • From a lecturer, when I was a student • From a teacher • Mentioned in an undergraduate lecture. • Tutor • In my time as a graduate student, by a professor's recommendation. • When researching my ancestor's George Thomason Collection • From a professor during undergraduate studies • Mentioned by a prof • From teachers when I was a postgraduate student • From a graduate supervisor • Contributor • Folger Shakespeare Library • Probably from hearing lecturers mention it during my undergraduate study. • In a grad course for an assignment I had to do • Mentioned in a postgrad course description. Who to target? Where did you first hear about EEBO? How do you prefer to learn about digital resources?

14. Further work Impact and public engagement Engaging the public Measuring wider impact Online cultural heritage: how can the Bodleian best reach a general audience?

15. Developing connections Early Modern Texts: Digital Methods and Methodologies, 16-17 September 2013 University of Oxford http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/conferences/conference-eebo-tcp-2013/

16. Contact www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/eebotcp/SECT @OxfordEEBOTCP eebotcp@bodleian.ox.ac.uk judith.siefring@bodleian.ox.ac.uk