The University of Michigan, the University of Oxford, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and ProQuest Information and Learning are engaged in an exceptional partnership to create structured SGML/XML text editions for a significant portion of the Short Title Catalog of Early English books published between 1473 and 1700. ProQuest has already created digital images for more than 125,000 works, distributed under the title Early English Books Online. The Universities of Michigan and Oxford, with the support of the international library community, are creating accurately keyboarded and tagged editions of a significant portion of this culturally significant corpus. The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership has since 2000 been engaged in creating searchable and readable transcriptions and linking them directly to the corresponding ProQuest image files. In combination, the text and image editions of these works provide a powerful research and instructional tool of unquestioned enduring value.

The original goal of EEBO-TCP was to convert 25,000 titles: the 25,000^th text was edited in January of 2009 and should be online by mid-summer. The Partnership is pressing forward with renewed momentum and gathering support for a more ambitious goal: that of producing full-text transcriptions of all the unique English-language printed books extant from before 1700, or approximately an additional 40-45,000 titles.