News Archive

June 28, 2003

TCP Newsletter

The TCP has released a new newsletter for Summer of 2003 containing general updates for the both the EEBO-TCP and Evans-TCP projects. This newsletter will be 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.

June 27, 2003

TCP Meetings at the 2003 ALA Annual Meeting in Toronto, Canada

The Text Creation Partnership held two meetings on Sunday, June 22nd in Toronto. Both meetings were well attended and went quite well. For those of you unable to attend, here's a brief summary of the meetings

1.	Mark Sandler welcomed everybody to the meetings and thanked the many people who have been attending these updates year in and year out. We have a large variety of interested people in the TCP from bibliographers to library directors, and we're very happy to have such a good group of people attending our meetings.
2.	Mark then thanked our new partners that have joined the Text Creation Partnership. These include the Claremont Colleges, McGill University, Middle Tennessee State University, Texas Christian University, and the University of Colorado who have joined in the past six months. They join the British Library, Vanderbilt University, University of Massachusetts, University of North Carolina, and the University of Washington who have joined this year and the over 70 institutions that have joined the partnership overall.
3.	Shawn followed this with more good news about production. There are over 800 new texts in the past six months and both vendor accuracy and volume has increased significantly. This will allow the TCP to put through better and more numerous texts over the coming months
4.	Shawn followed this by taking a look at usage data. Overall, it is up over 60%. However, users are generally not using the "word index" function, nor are they looking much at the Table of Contents. This causes some concern. Several of the participants indicated that having these statistics more available would be helpful. You can access your individual stats for the EEBO-TCP site at http://stats.umdl.umich.edu . Jo-Anne Hogan of ProQuest then looked at usage data of EEBO to see how our statistics matched up. In many ways, they are similar, and EEBO usage is also up significantly. However EEBO usage so far is much greater than TCP usage and any help in getting the TCP used more would be a great asset.
5.	Kristen Demlow, an MLIS student working with TCP followed up on this information and looked at how libraries presented the TCP on their websites. So far, only 50% of participating libraries list EEBO-TCP as a resource, which might be helpful. She also determined that steps such as including EEBO/EEBO-TCP in library instruction, mentioning the essay contest, listing EEBO and EEBO-TCP in subject guides, and including tutorials might be helpful.
6.	Several participants believed that EEBO-TCP (Text Creation Partnership) is not descriptive enough for students who are looking for full text access to the collection. Perhaps some alternative labeling might be helpful in attracting students and potential users to the site.
7.	Shawn announced that 600 records of EEBO-TCP records had been released to the University of Toronto. These records will be downloaded and processed at the University of Toronto system and then downloaded into ITER (a bibliography of Renaissance resources based at the University of Toronto). Once we've worked out all of the problems, we will eventually distribute TCP records to all of our partners
8.	Shawn then commented on the wide variety of scholarly and classroom use this database has attracted everything from gender roles in Restoration theatre to a dictionary of early modern English and both introductory undergraduate courses to advanced graduate seminars.
9.	ProQuest then updated people on EEBO usage and plans for the future development of the product including new interface changes planned for October of 2003 which will incorporate the full texts into their database as well as improvements to searching and other capabilities available in EEBO.
10.	The TCP meeting then moved on into announcements about the Evans-TCP for Readex's Early American Imprints Product. The TCP will be creating about 6,000 texts for that product as well, and these texts open up the possiblity of enhanced full text searching in the Evans corpus in addition to cross searching the EEBO and Evans texts.
11.	Shawn then mentioned that over twenty institutions have so far joined the Evans Text Creation Partnership including Boston College, Bucknell University,Columbia University, Indiana University, McGill University, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Southern Illinois University,University of Arizona, University of Chicago, University of Cincinnati, University of Hong Kong, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, University of New Mexico, University of Pittsburgh, Vassar College, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University.
12.	Finally, Shawn showed the new Evans-TCP website at http://www.lib.umich.edu/evans/ and the Evans-TCP demo site at http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/evansdemo/. Both of these are now fully functioning and available.

 

June 2, 2003

TCP at 2003 ALA Annual Conference

The Text Creation Partnership will be at the 2003 Annual ALA conference with our partners, ProQuest Information and Learning. At the meeting we will be discussing

1. New EEBO-TCP Partners
2. Production Updates for the EEBO-TCP
3. Updates on distribution of EEBO-TCP Catalog records
4. Known research and instructional use of EEBO this year
5. Update on EEBO-TCP Usage Data
6. Announcement of the Evans-TCP initiative
7. New Evans-TCP Partners
8. Announcement of Evans-Demo and Website
9. Discussion of future directions for the TCP

Please join us in the Wellington Room at the Crowne Plaza - Toronto Centre Hotel on

Sunday, June 22nd, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm
OR
Sunday, June 22nd, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

We look forward to seeing you there!

May 1, 2003

ProQuest Information and Learning has announced changes for the Early English Books Online (EEBO) product including a new interface to be released over the summer that will provide friendlier search screens, title browsing, and many other new and improved features. Additionally, they will be adding another 4,300 titles (nearly half a million pages) in 2003. If you are interested in the ProQuest EEBO product, they have a free featured content page you can view, or you can contact ProQuest sales at pqsales@il.proquest. com.

April 23, 2003

A review of the Early English Books Online Product from ProQuest and an article about the Early English Books Online - Text Creation Partnership appeared in the latest version of the Charleston Advisor in March 2003. The review says that the EEBO product is "an online equivalent to a 96,000 volume rare book library" and "scholars will relish the opportunity to investigate cultural practices from original documentation."

April 3, 2003

EEBO-TCP Announces Evans Early American Imprints Text Initiative

April 3, 2003

EEBO-TCP at Renaissance Society of America 2003

EEBO-TCP presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America on Electronic Resources in Scholarly Publishing and distributed a great deal of promotional material at the ProQuest Exhibit booth also at the conference. The conference went very well and there were many inquiries about improving and joining the project. Both EEBO-TCP and EEBO look forward to following up on these inquiries and getting more as the 2003 conference season commences.

January 2003

ALA Midwinter 2003 Meetings

EEBO-TCP held two meetings at the 2003 ALA Midwinter Conference in Philadelphia. Both meetings were extremely well attended and went very well. Thanks to all of you who crammed into the ProQuest suite, and listened to the presentations. For those of you who were not able to come, here's a brief summary.

1.	Mark Sandler introduced the new members of the EEBO staff including Shawn Martin, new Project Outreach Librarian for EEBO-TCP at Michigan and Jo-Anne Hogan, new Product Manager for EEBO at ProQuest
2.	William Gosling, Director of the University Library at Michigan and chair of the Board of Directors introduced new Board Members William Miller, Library Director at Florida Atlantic University, Steven Hall from ProQuest, and Marianne Gaunt, University Librarian at Rutgers University
3.	William Gosling also talked about the new partners of the EEBO-TCP including Vanderbilt, University of North Carolina, University of Massachusetts, University of Washington, and the British Library
4.	Mark Sandler talked about the update to the EEBO-TCP Project site
5.	Mary Sauer-Games discussed new markets for the EEBO Product both nationally and internationally at ProQuest
6.	Jo-Anne Hogan announced the winnder of the EEBO in Undergraduate Studies Essay Competition, Irina Alexandra from the University of Toronto
7.	Shawn Martin and Jo-Anne Hogan lead a discussion of the EEBO interface available

EEBO-TCP at ALA
EEBO-TCP will be at the 2003 Midwinter ALA conference with our partners, ProQuest Information and Learning. At the meeting you will get to meet some of our new team members, find out about recent partner commitments and production, learn some advanced search tips on the TCP text site, and see the new TCP project site. We will also be discussing navigation between text and images, and ProQuest's development of an interface for full-text access.

Please join us in the ProQuest Suite at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel on
Sunday, Jan 26th, 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Monday, Jan 27th, 10:00 am - 12:00 pm

We look forward to seeing you there!

Welcome to New Staff
We are very pleased to welcome Shawn Martin to the EEBO-TCP staff. Shawn Martin will be taking over Hillary Nunn's position as the Project Outreach Librarian. He comes to us from the Ohio Historical Society where he worked on the Ohio Memory Project (a cooperative project similar to the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress). Before that, he graduated with an M.A. in early modern British history at the College of William and Mary and worked for the Digital Library Project at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. You can contact Shawn at shawnmar@umich.edu or at (734) 936-5611.

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