Project Status / The Texts

Text Selection Discussion

As of April 2009, 22,831 texts are available online, and an additional 4,774 are in preparation. You can view a list of texts that have been selected for keyboarding.

To date, the Early English Books Online corpus contains the page images of 125,000 titles; because the EEBO Text Creation Partnership's five-year plan provides for the encoding of 25,000 of these texts, settling on guidelines for selecting the works to be encoded has involved some difficult decisions. Two Selection Task Forces met on 30 and 31 March 2000 and July 28 and 29 2003 to discuss selection issues. Their recommendations have been endorsed by the EEBO Text Creation Partnership's Governing Board and have been adopted as the official guidelines for the project. Here is a brief account of the Task Force's recommendations:

• Selection is based on the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (NCBEL).

  Works are eligible to be encoded if the name of their author appears in NCBEL. Anonymous works may also be selected if their titles appear in the bibliography. The NCBEL was chosen as a guideline because it includes foundational works as well as less canonical titles related to a wide variety of fields, not just literary studies.

• Unless there is a compelling scholarly reason not to, only first editions are selected.

  This allows for a broader array of titles to be made searchable.

• If the project gains funding that will allow it to go beyond works in NCBEL, selection will begin with the earliest titles in EEBO.



• A work will not be passed over for encoding simply because it is available in another electronic collection.

  Not only is the quality of these collections sometimes uncertain, a text's presence outside of EEBO will not allow it to be searched through the same interface as the EEBO encoded texts.



• EEBO-TCP staff will also select titles according to subjects suggested by relevant faculty



• EEBO-TCP will appoint an academic advisory group to review and assist in selecting titles