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 nearly 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 proposed to create 25,000 searchable and readable editions that link immediately 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.