SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition

1. SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership creates XML-encoded editions of early printed books. On completion, the corpus will include around 70, 000 full texts. The JISC-funded SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition project explored how best to sustain the EEBO-TCP corpus and to ensure the best possible ongoing resource for our users. We should make the EEBO-TCP data easily available in multiple formats, e.g. plain text, ePub, XML, etc. It is vital for the sustainability of the EEBO-TCP resource that users are made as aware as possible of the project, the corpus, the editorial principles on which it is based, and the opportunities that it offers in research and teaching. We should target documentation and teaching guides at our core academic users, thereby filtering information down to student users. • Simple preservation of the data set is vital, but not enough. We must work to provide ongoing support for project personnel, and actively seek to meet the needs of our users. • What do users want? • Better quality transcriptions • Completeness/comprehensiveness of coverage • Links to other resources e.g. ESTC • Free open access to images and text • Richer tagging EEBO-TCP: From image ... How do we improve EEBO-TCP’s sustainability? ... to searchable, downloadable full text … We must improve awareness of the project and differentiate ourselves from ProQuest’s image resource. Users need to know more about our project and how we can help them. Continued development of the corpus is central to its sustainability. Collaborationwith scholars and other projects should be actively sought. Funding should be found to improve and enhance the resource, and to keep it up-to-date and relevant for our users. Fostering a community of users, editors, publishers and funders will allow us to share ideas and pursue new opportunities and links with other digital resources, for our mutual benefit. It is important that digital content creators work to combat the culture of non-citation of digital sources which persists in some scholarly circles. This will chiefly be achieved by publicizing the importance of digital citation and by making citation easy. ... using TEI-based encoding. For more information, see 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