Evans Early American Imprint Collection - Text Creation Partnership: Production

GOALS & STRATEGIES

Project Goals:
The University of Michigan in cooperation with Newsbank/Readex, the American Antiquarian Society, and with the financial support of libraries worldwide, is creating accurately keyboarded and SGML/XML encoded text editions for a significant portion of the Evans Early American Imprints Collection. Known as the Evans-Text Creation Partnership (Evans-TCP), this cooperative academic initiative is producing legible and searchable encoded texts that link to corresponding page images from NewsBank/Readex's Evans product. For students and scholars, this allows immediate search access to the content of thousands of historically significant works, while retaining the cultural context of the original print representation of the material. The Evans-Text Creation Partnership offers a number of important benefits to the library community:

Entrusts conversion of important but difficult works to the university community, supporting appropriate scholarly review and intervention;
Draws upon community expertise to develop the scope and standards underlying such projects;
Carries forward the work in a cost effective manner by distributing the costs across many academic institutions, as well as encouraging substantial contributions from commercial partners;
Ensures that Partner libraries co-own the resulting text file with robust rights to manage, re-use, and distribute the file as they see fit-including the right to distribute texts beyond their campus or community authenticated users.

Creating the Text file:
We are often asked if it wouldn't be possible to make Evans texts searchable through optical character recognition. Our belief is that OCR would not produce an acceptable or cost effective result. Keyboarding and tagging also provide the following benefits that are particularly well suited to early texts in a large corpus like Evans:

Because the text is accurate, it can be displayed (unlike in most OCR based projects) and hence provides a legible reading copy of the Evans texts that, because of early fonts and printing in the original, can be difficult for novice readers to decipher.
Word and phrase searching is not only more accurate, results are also displayed in context of surrounding text to help sort through a large number of returns.
Tagging allows for more precise searching such as limiting searches to titles, headings, notes, stage directions, captions, acts, verses, etc.
Tagging also renders a browseable structure to any text, analogous to a table of contents, by producing a hierarchy of titles, sections, chapter headings and sub headings.
The willingness to display accurately keyboarded texts allows the reader to access an index of all words in the corpus-or in a designated work- that can serve as an index, concordance, or a check on variant spellings and word forms.
Standard tagging of the texts allows the corpus to be combined with other corpora tagged to the same standard, hence allowing the reader to search across multiple collections.

Evans Content
The Evans collection consists of the works represented in the American Bibliography by Charles Evans which trace the history of the American colonies that would eventually become the United States. The corpus covers topics as diverse as temperance, witchcraft, slavery, diplomacy and music. The 40,000 works of the Evans corpus is a mainstay for understanding the development of Western culture in general and the Anglo-American world in particular.

Licensing and Access
The Evans-TCP project is notable for creating quality electronic editions of culturally significant content of enduring value. It is also notable for doing so under terms that foster scholarly use and widespread access. Partner institutions are co-owners of the text file and are entitled to copies of that file for local loading and management. As owners of the file, having funded its creation, partners can treat the file as if locally created and can distribute the texts to an audience beyond strictly authorized users if it should choose to open it's servers in this way. Likewise, the license allows scholars to use texts in their entirety to reproduce or create new editions. Our cooperative agreement with Readex is intended to protect their investment in the Evans project while maintaining the principle of public domain access to early texts.

For partner institutions not yet prepared to support a local implementation of searchable Evans texts, access is presently provided without charge by libraries at the University of Michigan. Users can search TCP editions at these sites and retrieve both relevant text portions and corresponding page images.

Benefits for Scholarly Researchers:
Word and phrase searching of the Evans corpus provides a new research dimension never before available through print, microfilm or digital page facsimiles. Scholars are now able to pinpoint references to subjects, people or places that would not be indicated in a brief bibliographic citation. The search interface also allows scholars to uncover word patterns and other literary or linguistic forms across texts. Whether a user is seeking contemporaneous references to people or events, tracing citations to authors like Cotton Mather, or quickly finding known quotes, these thousands of searchable texts open up an array of research possibilities that was unthinkable when the texts were only accessible by author, title and broad subject

Benefits for Teachers and Students:
The ease of access that Evans and the Evans-TCP offers to texts once confined to rare originals and microfilm will make the corpus a significant part of classroom teaching on a number of campuses. As these Evans works become searchable, they will become even easier to use in the classroom. Students will readily find references to the American Revolution, or remedies for common diseases, benefiting from clearly legible text with instant access to original illustrations and typefaces.