       
NEWS
June 25, 2006 Minutes of TCP Project Update ALA Annual Conference – New Orleans, LA – June 25, 2006 Introduction: The meeting began with Mark Sandler talking about the continued interest in the three projects and the great turnouts there are for each meeting. He then turned the meeting over to John Price-Wilkin who thanked Mark for his continued service to the University Library and particularly to the TCP project. Though Mark is leaving for a job at the CIC, the library is committed to continuing the project and looks forward to further involvement with Mark regarding TCP and many other projects. John then turned it over to the three publishing partners, Readex, ProQuest, and Gale to discuss updates with their products. TCP Updates: Shawn Martin then updated the group on the latest developments with the TCP. New Partners: The TCP now has 5 new partners including both large research institutions and small liberal arts colleges EEBO-TCP
• Amherst College • Florida Gulf Coast University • Kenyon College • University of Georgia • University of Nevada - Las Vegas Evans-TCP Production: EEBO-TCP now has 11,463 texts currently available and adds around 500 bi-monthly. Evans-TCP now has 1,207 texts currently available and adds 150 bi-monthly. ECCO-TCP has a demo now available to partner institutions at http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/. There are 23 titles currently online in the demo, and 566 items are completed which will go into the database once its online, and it adds around 150 texts bi-monthly. ECCO-TCP- Task Force In August of 2005, TCP held a task force to determine selection guidelines for the ECCO-TCP collection. They suggested that TCP: • Use New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature TCP Conference: The TCP is hosting a conference September 15-16, 2006 to discuss issues of how TCP is used in scholarship, research, and teaching. It is open to all who have an interest including librarians, professors, publishers, vendors, non-profits, students (undergraduate and graduate). For more information visit the conference website http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/conference. Virtual Modernization: Jeff Garrett then gave a talk about the virtual modernization project he and Martin Mueller are working on at Northwestern. A copy of his slides are available at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/collections/garrett/TCP_Virt-Mod.ppt ECCO Records Mark and Jeff then discussed a project currently going on in partnership with ESTC, Gale, and several universities to include subject headings in records for the ECCO. This will greatly enhance the accessiblity of the database to a variety of users including both advanced scholars and undergraduates. January 11, 2006 TCP is proud to announce that it will be holding a conference in Ann Arbor September 14-17, 2006. The Call for Papers is below. Please feel to pass this on, or contact Shawn Martin for further information: Bringing Text Alive: The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project was founded at the University of Michigan in 1999 to reinvent scholarship by creating fully searchable texts of thousands of titles printed across three hundred years and two continents of English and American history. TCP includes texts selected from three commercially produced page image collections, Early English Books Online (EEBO), available from ProQuest Information and Learning, Evans Early American Imprints (Evans), available from Newsbank-Readex and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), available from Thompson-Gale. Additionally, TCP’s production has expanded to include centers at Oxford University, the University of Toronto, and the National Library of Wales. TCP cooperates directly with over a dozen international scholarly projects devoted to subjects as wide ranging as historical linguistics, literary studies, bibliographic studies, and metadata integration. Scholars and students alike, in these disciplines and many others have found often make the claim that resources like EEBO, Evans, ECCO, and the TCP have revolutionized their work and by making primary sources widely available, will “bring literature alive” (Thomas Pack, E-Content, Dec. 1999). As the TCP project reaches the halfway mark of its original goals, it seems a good time to investigate how it brings literature in all disciplines to life in this exciting conference. The conference invites papers from scholars, students (graduate
and undergraduate), librarians, publishers, or other interested
people in all disciplines to investigate topics such as (but not
limited to): The conference will be held September 14 - 17, 2006 in Ann Arbor,
MI For more information contact: Phone: (734) 975-0102 Or visit the conference website http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/conference January 22, 2006 Minutes of TCP Project Update ALA Midwinter Conference – San Antonio, TX – January 22, 2006 Introduction: The meeting began with Mark Sandler talking about the continued interest in the three projects and the great turnouts there are for each meeting. He then introduced William Gosling and the representatives from the three publishing partners (ProQuest, Readex, and Gale). Board Update: William Gosling then introduced the Board members who were present and gave a brief summary of the meeting which included updates on current outreach and budgetary concerns, the opportunities of moving forward with three projects (EEBO, Evans, and ECCO), and the challenges in administering three projects as we move into the future. The Board meeting also included discussion of the impact of the Google digitization project on TCP and the upcoming TCP conference. More complete details are available in the Board meeting minutes available at http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/News/Board_10_20_Minutes.html Bill also mentioned that: Publisher Update: Representatives from the three publishers then updated the group about their products. Remmel Nunn from Readex said that Evans now has 376 subscribers and continues to grow, and TCP continues to select and recruit partners to achieve the goal of creating 6,000 texts. Scott Dawson from Gale mentioned that ECCO now has 138,000 titles and over 110 subscribers including subscribers in Brazil, China, and the UK. Mary Sauer-Games from ProQuest talked about the increasing interest of smaller liberal arts institutions subscribing to EEBO and the integration of EEBO-TCP text and EEBO images in the interface available from ProQuest. TCP Updates: Shawn Martin then updated the group on the latest developments with the TCP. New Partners: The TCP now has 5 new partners including both large research institutions and small liberal arts colleges EEBO-TCP Evans-TCP Production: EEBO-TCP now has 10,982 texts currently available and adds around 500 bi-monthly. Evans-TCP now has 1,078 texts currently available and adds 150 bi-monthly. ECCO-TCP has a demo now available to partner institutions at http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/. There are 23 titles currently online in the demo, and 314 items are completed which will go into the database once its online, and it adds around 150 texts bi-monthly. DLXS, the interface used to deliver TCP text, has also undergone an upgrade which will allow users to do a variety of things including view foreign characters, musical notation, and gaps in text in a better way. ECCO-TCP- Task Force In August of 2005, TCP held a task force to determine selection guidelines for the ECCO-TCP collection. They suggested that TCP: • Use New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature TCP in Scholarship: Scholars are now routinely using TCP in their own research and
teaching in a variety of areas (not just Renaissance studies).
Scholars or staff from the TCP will be speaking at the following
conferences in 2006: Also, TCP text is being used in the following scholarly projects Undergraduate Essay Contest: The winners of the Undergraduate Essay Contest are Grand Prize: Courtney Peacock – Brigham Young University First Prize: Stefania Crowther – University of Warwick Second Prize: Michael Sechler – University of Pittsburgh
Honorable Mention: Edward Esborn – Johns Hopkins University
TCP Conference: The TCP is hosting a conference September 14-17, 2006 to discuss issues of how TCP is used in scholarship, research, and teaching. It is open to all who have an interest including librarians, professors, publishers, vendors, non-profits, students (undergraduate and graduate). For more information visit the conference website http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/conference. Discussion: The bulk of the meeting was spent in discussion of the wider issues relating to the TCP initiative. The discussion was led by Nancy Davenport, the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources. Questions included: We are very grateful to Nancy Davenport for facilitating an excellent
discussion and for all of the people who contributed. There were
many excellent ideas for further outreach possibilities, improvement
of the system to facilitate better searching for scholars, and
ideas that could and should be explored further at the TCP conference.
Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion, and staff
at the TCP, publishers, and vendors will be discussing these ideas
in the coming weeks to determine what will be possible over the
next six months.
January 1, 2006 The TCP has released a new newsletter for Winter of 2005/2006 containing general updates for the EEBO-TCP, Evans-TCP projects, and ECCO-TCP. This newsletter is released bi-annually by the project for people interested in updates, how the projects are used, and more. If you have any questions or comments about the newsletter or
would like some paper copies, please contact shawnmar@umich.edu. September 23, 2005 Eighteenth-Century Collections Online – Text Creation
Partnership Faculty Participants: David Porter (University of Michigan), John Richetti (University of Pennsylvania), George Starr (University of California – Berkeley), and Howard Weinbrot (University of Wisconsin) University of Michigan Library Staff: Andrew Kuster, John Latta, Mona Logarbo, Shawn Martin, Mark Sandler, Bryan Skib, and Perry Willett Gale Staff: Jeffrey Moyer Purpose: To discuss and draft guidelines for selection of titles from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database available from Gale for full text conversion in the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online – Text Creation Partnership (ECCO-TCP) collection. Discussions: Staff associated with the two projects (ECCO and ECCO-TCP) devoted most of the morning of the first day informing participants about the relationship between Gale and Michigan, how the databases work together, the difference between Optical Character Recognition (OCR) text that Gale uses for ECCO and keyboarded and tagged text that the University of Michigan uses for ECCO-TCP. After these sessions, there was general discussion about the various approaches TCP could take to selecting text for full text conversion. Possible strategies included selecting among bibliographies like the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, utilizing the bibliographies from the New Cambridge History of English Literature, conducting a comprehensive search of all of the anthologies published in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and making use of several other secondary sources including Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, and Barbara Benedict’s work on eighteenth century miscellanies. Other strategies included using quality of OCR text as a selection factor (the worse the OCR, the greater the need for keyboarded text), utilizing Gale’s statistics on most popular titles for inclusion in ECCO-TCP, considering materials that would benefit from structural tagging (works like dictionaries, encyclopedias, plays, and books of correspondence), selecting all books that came out in three editions or more, consulting scholars from the American and British Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and soliciting suggestions from the eighteenth-century listserv. Discussion then focused on the audience for the ECCO-TCP database. The previous two task forces held for EEBO-TCP and Evans-TCP came to two different conclusions. The EEBO-TCP task force determined that the audience was primarily advanced scholars; the Evans-TCP task force determined that the database would be especially helpful to undergraduates. Since the audience in many ways determines how texts should be selected, members discussed whether users of ECCO-TCP would be primarily advanced researchers, undergraduates, or even the general public. They determined that it would be a mixture of these audiences rather than any one exclusively. Primarily, the intended audience for the ECCO-TCP should, according to the group, be the university community including undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars. Other questions were then asked about the use of a corpus like ECCO-TCP for other audiences like historians, scholars of other romance languages, art, and other disciplines, and, given this diversity of fields, should works included in foreign languages, materials like acts of Parliament, indentures, or works from particular genres or time periods be selected. It was determined that this database would be of primary use to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students interested in the eighteenth-century; much work in eighteenth-century studies is currently done by a broad range of not only literary scholars, but also social historians, legal scholars, and specialists in religious and economic studies. So, though the members of the task force were largely literary scholars interested in tapping the collection for their own work, they were also aware that selection strategies for ECCO-TCP should be mindful of the broad constituencies which this corpus can serve. Several topics of interest were included in this discussion such as women’s literature, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, travel literature, plant and animal husbandry, building, architecture, and gardening. As a result of this brainstorming, it was suggested that TCP develop a pedagogical guide, with the help of eighteenth-century specialists at ASECS, BSECS, and the eighteenth-century listserv to help in selection and provide potential users with ideas on how to work with the database. The second day of the task force, participants summarized discussion from the previous day and tried to devise particular guidelines that could be used to start the selection process. These include: 1. ECCO-TCP will use the New Cambridge Bibliography of English
Literature as a guide to begin the selection process, because
this standard reference work is by no means confined in scope
to ‘literature,’ but provides a good overview of writing
of all kinds—philosophical, religious, travel, periodical,
historical, and so on. It was decided that these guidelines should help to create an
initial balanced corpus of material for the subset of items that
will be transcribed in the ECCO-TCP collection. The ECCO-TCP project
librarian will also follow up with relevant scholars requesting
works and materials that should also be included, and will arrange
for another task force meeting to follow up on these recommendations.
The staff of both the TCP and Gale are extremely grateful for
the time and effort of the people involved. For further questions,
information about this meeting or for suggestions of potential
ECCO-TCP titles, please contact eccotcp-info@umich.edu. June 26, 2005 Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL The Text Creation Partnership held one meeting on June 26th with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex. The meeting was very well attended by representatives of current partner institutions, text conversion vendors, and those considering partnership. The meeting started off with introductions from Mark Sandler and an update from TCP Board Chair, William Gosling who reported: 1. About 1,000 texts have been added to EEBO since January and TCP collections will total 10,000 during the summer. 2. Evans text production continues at a rate of about 75 per month. There are over 600 currently and there should be close to 750 in the Summer. 3. ProQuest continues to add text to their database 676 last month for a total of 8,600 currently 4. 20 institutions have joined since January (12 EEBO, 8 Evans) including 10 ARLs 5. There is a demo for the ECCO-TCP containing 22 texts keyboarding vendors have been selected to commence at a rate of about 75 texts per month 6. Usage stats for the database continue to go up. There are 47,000 uses so far this year as compared to 29,000 this time last year (92,000 total for last year). Shawn Martin then went into more detail on some of these points. He listed the new partners for EEBO-TCP: Dartmouth College, MIT, Skidmore College, Tulane University, University of British Columbia, University of California - Irvine, University of Nebraska, University of Ottawa, University of Southern California, Williams College, and York University and Evans-TCP: Baylor University, Claremont Colleges, Dartmouth College, Emory University, Simon Fraser University, Texas Christian University, UCLA, Utah State University, and Williams College. Shawn also pointed out that Evans-TCP has been increasing its visibility in scholarship including a recent presentation on Evans and Evans-TCP in graduate teaching at the Society of Early Americanists in Spring of 2005. Finally, Shawn demonstrated the new ECCO-TCP demo site available at http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/ Catherine Mardikes and Mark Olsen from the University of Chicago then demonstrated the implementation of EEBO-TCP texts into the PhiloLogic database at the University of Chicago and how partner institutions of the TCP can integrate texts into their own interfaces for local audiences and uses. Martin Mueller, a professor of English at Northwestern University then talked about one particular use for his research. He works on historical linguistics and is using TCP and other texts to create spelling normalization on variants of early modern English and can quickly look at variants, manipulate text, and create concordances in a matter of seconds with TCP text and computer programs like PhiloLogic with much greater accuracy and speed than has ever before been possible. TCP is very grateful for the insights and expertise of Martin
Mueller, Catherine Mardikes, and Mark Olsen and is thankful for
their willingness to come to the meeting and share their thoughts. January 16, 2005 Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston, MA The Text Creation Partnership held one meeting on January 16th with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex. The meeting was very well attended by representatives of current partner institutions, text conversion vendors, and those considering partnership. The meeting opened with an introduction by Mark Sandler who thanked everyone for coming and talked about the Google digitization project now going forward at Michigan and Michigan's dedication to making digital access available. Representatives from the three commercial publishers then spoke about their respective databases. Mary Sauer-Games from ProQuest mentioned that TCP texts have been loaded into their database and around 6,000 are currently available. Also, they had an excellent year for sales with consortiums in Canada and the Oberlin group buying EEBO and many of them coming into TCP as well. Remmel Nunn from Readex also talked about sales for the Evans and the Archive Americana project. Rich Foley from Gale then spoke about the ECCO project and a good year for them in sales as well too. Shawn Martin then gave an update on the TCP projects. 1. It was an excellent year for TCP. Overall, 30 institutions joined the partnership last year. Since ALA Annual, the following institutions joined EEBO-TCP: Albion College, Bates College, Brown University, Bucknell University, Carleton College, Colby College, Earlham College, Mt. Holyoke College, National University of Ireland - Galway, Rollins College, St. Louis University, UC – Berkeley, University of Arizona, University of Arkansas, University of Maryland, University of Mississippi, University of Western Ontario, and Western Michigan University. The following joined Evans-TCP: Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, University of Connecticut, University of North Carolina – Greensboro, University of Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian College Association (representing over 30 colleges in the Appalachian region). There are now nearly 8,000 texts available in EEBO-TCP. Around 500 are added bi-monthly, and there has been increased usage over the past year. Evans-TCP is now available to partner institutions at http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/e/evans/. There are around 300 titles currently available and 150 are added bi-monthly. TCP is beginning to start production on ECCO-TCP and we hope to have a demo by summer of 2005. 2. The Board of Directors also met in October of 2004 and discussed
among many issues the evolving role of the Board given the addition
of two new projects, the project budget, rights of use for publishers
and scholarly projects to use TCP texts, a price increase for
new partners scheduled to take place in April of 2005, how to
include multiple editions of text when asked by scholars, and
how to evolve the TCP model to fit larger community goals. The
TCP is very grateful for the insights and advice of the Board
members who include: Betty G. Bengtson 3. In January of 2005 the University of Chicago launched TCP texts into the PhiloLogic database available at http://lib.uchicago.edu/efts/EEBO/. This allows users the ability to gain access to the texts and manipulate it in new ways. 4. The winners of the EEBO in Undergraduate essay contest were Grand Prize: Heidi Atwood – Washington College First Prize: Meghan Fadel – SUNY – Buffalo Second Prize: Daniel Ward – University of Warwick Honorable Mention: Bianca Bonomi – University of Warwick
Thanks also to our judges Katrien Daemen-de Gelder (Professor of English, University of Ghent), Julia Gardner (School of Information, University of Michigan), Arthur Kinney (Professor of English, University of Massachusetts), Hillary Nunn (Professor of English, University of Akron), Newton Key (Professor of English, Eastern Illinois University), and Kim Yates (Assistant Director, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto). More information is available about the essay contest at http://www.lib.umich.edu/edu_essay.html. The second half of the meeting was devoted to a roundtable discussion of the TCP in academic research and in teaching. TCP invited the following to give their perspectives on how such resources have been used in their work and how such things could be used as we move into the future: Steven Bullock – Professor of History, Worcester Polytechnic
Institute We are very grateful for their insights and expertise and thankful
for their willingness to come to the meeting and share their thoughts. June 27, 2004 Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL The Text Creation Partnership held two meetings on June 27th with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex. Both were well attended by representatives of current partner institutions, text conversion vendors, and those considering partnership. The meeting opened with an introduction by Mark Sandler who thanked everyone for coming and introduced Bill Gosling, University Librarian at the University of Michigan and Chair of the EEBO-TCP Advisory Board. Bill talked about the tremendous impact the project has had on teaching and research and noted the contributions of partners both in North America and the UK, most notably Oxford University, our EEBO-TCP project partner in the UK. Perry Willett, the new Director of Digital Library Production Services at the University of Michigan then spoke about the efforts and insights of DLPS and their tremendous amount of expertise and dedication to the project. Shawn Martin then began updates on the three products and projects. Mary Sauer-Games from ProQuest talked about the new interface and loading of text that ProQuest has recently done and how much it has and will continue to enhance the EEBO product for students and researchers; Remmel Nunn from Readex discussed the development of the Evans product, and Rich Foley talked about the partnership with TCP and the development of the ECCO product from Gale. EEBO-TCP
Evans
ECCO-TCP
Finally, Robert Hatch, a professor of the history of science at the University of Florida discussed his own use of EEBO-TCP in research and in teaching. He demonstrated his website and how he uses it in classes. He then helped to lead the group in a discussion of how TCP could be used in classroom teaching, and how librarians and scholars can work together to promote and develop these resources. We're very grateful for Prof. Hatch's insights and expertise, and thank him again for his willingness to come to the meeting. February 3, 2004 TCP has released its latest newsletter for winter 2004. The TCP has released a new newsletter for Winter of 2004 containing general updates for the EEBO-TCP, Evans-TCP projects, and an announcement of ECCO-TCP. This newsletter is relased bi-annually by the project for people interested in updates, how the projects are used, and more. If you have any questions or comments about the newsletter or would like some paper copies, please contact shawnmar@umich.edu. February 3, 2004 TCP has released its latest newsletter for winter 2004. The TCP has released a new newsletter for Winter of 2004 containing general updates for the EEBO-TCP, Evans-TCP projects, and an announcement of ECCO-TCP. This newsletter is relased bi-annually by the project for people interested in updates, how the projects are used, and more. If you have any questions or comments about the newsletter or would like some paper copies, please contact shawnmar@umich.edu. January 15, 2004 Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego, CA The Text Creation Partnership held two meetings in San Diego on January 10th and 11th. One held in the Westin Horton Plaza with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex, and a smaller one in the ProQuest suite at the San Diego Marriott. Both were well attended by representatives of both current partner institutions and those considering partnership. The meeting opened with an introduction by Mark Sandler who thanked people for coming, discussed the tremendous development and scope that the TCP project had taken recently and introduced representatives from the three commercial publishers ProQuest, Readex, and Thomson-Gale. Ron Klausner, President of ProQuest Information and Learning then greeted attendees and discussed ProQuest's role in both the TCP and in teaching and learning among its customers. ProQuest is excited to be a part of this and looks forward to continuing to promote scholarship through its initiatives. At the meeting on the 10th, Ron was then followed by Rich Foley from Gale and Mark Sandler (who spoke on behalf of Readex). All of whom expressed their excitement to be involved with this initiative and their continued hopes for the success of the project. Bill Gosling, University Librarian at the University of Michigan then talked about the role the project had played in scholarship and the tremendous leadership that the project had displayed as a model for future collaboration. He especially thanked Mark Sandler for his continued leadership in the development of this initative. Shawn Martin then discussed the current developments in the three initiatives.
EEBO
Evans
ECCO
Jo-Anne Hogan from ProQuest then talked about ProQuest's new interface just released in the autumn and talked about how ProQuest was able to integrate TCP texts into their database and the advantages that this has brought to their users. TCP is very happy to have this cooperation with ProQuest and looks forward to the possibilities that integration with the images will bring both to the use of TCP text as well as to the scholarly community. Mark Sandler then discussed the future development of the project and how he continues to see it growing and serving as a model for the future. One example of this is the recent partnership with Thomson-Gale, but more may happen. It is exciting to see this idea move further, and both Mark and the partners of the project look forward to seeing how TCP develops over the next few years. Finally, attendees of the meeting discussed how EEBO-TCP has been used in scholarship and teaching in their classrooms and what has been done to promote use of the database on campus. We would especially like to thank Jeff Garrett (Northwestern), Tom Izbicki (Johns Hopkins), and Bob Scott (Columbia) for their hard work in promoting this project to their scholars and for their willingness to contribute to the discussion. January, 2004 TCP ANNOUNCES ECCO TEXT INITIATIVE The University of Michigan and Thomson-Gale are happy to announce that the Text Creation Partnership will be creating texts for Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), a culturually significant corpus containing 150,000 eighteenth century British titles, already made available by Gale in its commercial product. The Text Creation Partnership envisions keyboarding 10,000 of these works according to the standards already developed. We look forward to making this important corpus even more accessible. For more information, please contact Shawn Martin at shawnmar@umich.edu
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