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NEWS

June 25, 2006

Minutes of TCP Project Update

ALA Annual Conference – New Orleans, LA – June 25, 2006

Introduction:

The meeting began with Mark Sandler talking about the continued interest in the three projects and the great turnouts there are for each meeting. He then turned the meeting over to John Price-Wilkin who thanked Mark for his continued service to the University Library and particularly to the TCP project. Though Mark is leaving for a job at the CIC, the library is committed to continuing the project and looks forward to further involvement with Mark regarding TCP and many other projects. John then turned it over to the three publishing partners, Readex, ProQuest, and Gale to discuss updates with their products.

TCP Updates:

Shawn Martin then updated the group on the latest developments with the TCP.

New Partners:

The TCP now has 5 new partners including both large research institutions and small liberal arts colleges

EEBO-TCP
• Amherst College
• Florida Gulf Coast University
• Kenyon College
• University of Georgia
• University of Nevada - Las Vegas

Evans-TCP
• Ohio University
• University of Nevada - Las Vegas

Production:

EEBO-TCP now has 11,463 texts currently available and adds around 500 bi-monthly.

Evans-TCP now has 1,207 texts currently available and adds 150 bi-monthly.

ECCO-TCP has a demo now available to partner institutions at http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/. There are 23 titles currently online in the demo, and 566 items are completed which will go into the database once its online, and it adds around 150 texts bi-monthly.

ECCO-TCP- Task Force

In August of 2005, TCP held a task force to determine selection guidelines for the ECCO-TCP collection. They suggested that TCP:

• Use New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature
• Supplement with suggestions from scholars
• Normally exclude titles in languages other than English
• Focus on titles with complex structure
• Focus on authors who cross 17th and 18th centuries

TCP Conference:

The TCP is hosting a conference September 15-16, 2006 to discuss issues of how TCP is used in scholarship, research, and teaching. It is open to all who have an interest including librarians, professors, publishers, vendors, non-profits, students (undergraduate and graduate). For more information visit the conference website http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/conference.

Virtual Modernization:

Jeff Garrett then gave a talk about the virtual modernization project he and Martin Mueller are working on at Northwestern. A copy of his slides are available at http://www.library.northwestern.edu/collections/garrett/TCP_Virt-Mod.ppt

ECCO Records

Mark and Jeff then discussed a project currently going on in partnership with ESTC, Gale, and several universities to include subject headings in records for the ECCO. This will greatly enhance the accessiblity of the database to a variety of users including both advanced scholars and undergraduates.

January 11, 2006

TCP is proud to announce that it will be holding a conference in Ann Arbor September 14-17, 2006. The Call for Papers is below. Please feel to pass this on, or contact Shawn Martin for further information:

Bringing Text Alive:
The Future of Scholarship, Pedagogy, and Electronic Publication

The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) project was founded at the University of Michigan in 1999 to reinvent scholarship by creating fully searchable texts of thousands of titles printed across three hundred years and two continents of English and American history.

TCP includes texts selected from three commercially produced page image collections, Early English Books Online (EEBO), available from ProQuest Information and Learning, Evans Early American Imprints (Evans), available from Newsbank-Readex and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), available from Thompson-Gale. Additionally, TCP’s production has expanded to include centers at Oxford University, the University of Toronto, and the National Library of Wales. TCP cooperates directly with over a dozen international scholarly projects devoted to subjects as wide ranging as historical linguistics, literary studies, bibliographic studies, and metadata integration. Scholars and students alike, in these disciplines and many others have found often make the claim that resources like EEBO, Evans, ECCO, and the TCP have revolutionized their work and by making primary sources widely available, will “bring literature alive” (Thomas Pack, E-Content, Dec. 1999). As the TCP project reaches the halfway mark of its original goals, it seems a good time to investigate how it brings literature in all disciplines to life in this exciting conference.

The conference invites papers from scholars, students (graduate and undergraduate), librarians, publishers, or other interested people in all disciplines to investigate topics such as (but not limited to):
• Changes in the landscape of scholarship and pedagogy introduced by electronic resources like EEBO, Evans, ECCO, and the TCP
• Examples of teaching with such resources
• Examples of doing research with such resources
• Use of related resources like ESTC or Early American Newspapers
• The changing nature of scholarly communication
• Electronic publication
• Digital library development.

The conference will be held September 14 - 17, 2006 in Ann Arbor, MI
Deadline for paper submissions is May 15, 2006

For more information contact:
Shawn Martin
TCP Project Librarian
8076-B Hatcher S.
920 N. University Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

Phone: (734) 975-0102
Fax: (734) 763-5080
e-mail: shawnmar@umich.edu

Or visit the conference website http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/conference

January 22, 2006

Minutes of TCP Project Update

ALA Midwinter Conference – San Antonio, TX – January 22, 2006

Introduction:

The meeting began with Mark Sandler talking about the continued interest in the three projects and the great turnouts there are for each meeting. He then introduced William Gosling and the representatives from the three publishing partners (ProQuest, Readex, and Gale).

Board Update:

William Gosling then introduced the Board members who were present and gave a brief summary of the meeting which included updates on current outreach and budgetary concerns, the opportunities of moving forward with three projects (EEBO, Evans, and ECCO), and the challenges in administering three projects as we move into the future. The Board meeting also included discussion of the impact of the Google digitization project on TCP and the upcoming TCP conference. More complete details are available in the Board meeting minutes available at http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/News/Board_10_20_Minutes.html

Bill also mentioned that:
• the TCP project currently has the revenues needed to produce between 18,000 and 20,000 texts
• EEBO and Evans texts fully searchable and use increasing
• ECCO demo available with 20 texts
• All of these texts are fully cross searchable, meaning users can search across EEBO, Evans, and ECCO regardless of the commercial product
• Increasing number of scholarly interest and TCP working with projects at 7 universities in U.S. and Canada (in the U.S.: University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Washington University - St. Louis, University of Pennsylvania, and in Canada: University of Toronto, University of Victoria, and University of Western Ontario)
• The TCP conference will be held September14-17 for which there has already been great response, and we received money from the Delmas foundation and some of the publishers to sponsor the conference. A great opportunity to talk about common issues and explore the future of TCP.

Publisher Update:

Representatives from the three publishers then updated the group about their products. Remmel Nunn from Readex said that Evans now has 376 subscribers and continues to grow, and TCP continues to select and recruit partners to achieve the goal of creating 6,000 texts. Scott Dawson from Gale mentioned that ECCO now has 138,000 titles and over 110 subscribers including subscribers in Brazil, China, and the UK. Mary Sauer-Games from ProQuest talked about the increasing interest of smaller liberal arts institutions subscribing to EEBO and the integration of EEBO-TCP text and EEBO images in the interface available from ProQuest.

TCP Updates:

Shawn Martin then updated the group on the latest developments with the TCP.

New Partners:

The TCP now has 5 new partners including both large research institutions and small liberal arts colleges

EEBO-TCP
• Lafayette College
• Virginia Tech
• Haverford College

Evans-TCP
• Rice University
• University of Miami

Production:

EEBO-TCP now has 10,982 texts currently available and adds around 500 bi-monthly.

Evans-TCP now has 1,078 texts currently available and adds 150 bi-monthly.

ECCO-TCP has a demo now available to partner institutions at http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/. There are 23 titles currently online in the demo, and 314 items are completed which will go into the database once its online, and it adds around 150 texts bi-monthly.

DLXS, the interface used to deliver TCP text, has also undergone an upgrade which will allow users to do a variety of things including view foreign characters, musical notation, and gaps in text in a better way.

ECCO-TCP- Task Force

In August of 2005, TCP held a task force to determine selection guidelines for the ECCO-TCP collection. They suggested that TCP:

• Use New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature
• Supplement with suggestions from scholars
• Normally exclude titles in languages other than English
• Focus on titles with complex structure
• Focus on authors who cross 17th and 18th centuries

TCP in Scholarship:

Scholars are now routinely using TCP in their own research and teaching in a variety of areas (not just Renaissance studies). Scholars or staff from the TCP will be speaking at the following conferences in 2006:
• American Historical Association
• Renaissance Society of America
• Society of Early Americanists
• American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies

Also, TCP text is being used in the following scholarly projects
• Virtual Standardization (Northwestern)
• Philologic (Chicago)
• Spenser Editing Project (Washington)
• Renaissance Knowledgebase (Victoria)
• Lexicon of Early Modern English (Toronto)
• Two teaching projects in linguistics (Pennsylvania) and scholarly editing (Western Ontario)

Undergraduate Essay Contest:

The winners of the Undergraduate Essay Contest are

Grand Prize: Courtney Peacock – Brigham Young University
A New Israel: The Tetragrammaton and English Protestantism

First Prize: Stefania Crowther – University of Warwick
“Never Was King So Like to God Before:” Stella Meridiana and the Restoration Panegyric

Second Prize: Michael Sechler – University of Pittsburgh
Old Words, New Pages: Milton, Bracton, and the “Century of Revolution

Honorable Mention: Edward Esborn – Johns Hopkins University
Apprenticeship and Popular Literature in Seventeenth Century London

Honorable Mention: Emma Easy – University of Warwick
Mass Politics and Tory Anxieties: Thomas Durfey’s The Royalist

TCP Conference:

The TCP is hosting a conference September 14-17, 2006 to discuss issues of how TCP is used in scholarship, research, and teaching. It is open to all who have an interest including librarians, professors, publishers, vendors, non-profits, students (undergraduate and graduate). For more information visit the conference website http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/conference.

Discussion:

The bulk of the meeting was spent in discussion of the wider issues relating to the TCP initiative. The discussion was led by Nancy Davenport, the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources.

Questions included:
1. Is TCP a model for large scale production of such resources?
2. What tools will the next generation of scholars need?
3. Is there an approach to this that can be systematic?
4. If you could re-create TCP, how would you do it differently?
5. Why is TCP an important tool for libraries?

We are very grateful to Nancy Davenport for facilitating an excellent discussion and for all of the people who contributed. There were many excellent ideas for further outreach possibilities, improvement of the system to facilitate better searching for scholars, and ideas that could and should be explored further at the TCP conference. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the discussion, and staff at the TCP, publishers, and vendors will be discussing these ideas in the coming weeks to determine what will be possible over the next six months.

 

January 1, 2006

The TCP has released a new newsletter for Winter of 2005/2006 containing general updates for the EEBO-TCP, Evans-TCP projects, and ECCO-TCP. This newsletter is released 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 26, 2005

Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Annual Meeting in Chicago, IL

The Text Creation Partnership held one meeting on June 26th with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex. The meeting was very well attended by representatives of current partner institutions, text conversion vendors, and those considering partnership.

The meeting started off with introductions from Mark Sandler and an update from TCP Board Chair, William Gosling who reported:

1. About 1,000 texts have been added to EEBO since January and TCP collections will total 10,000 during the summer.

2. Evans text production continues at a rate of about 75 per month. There are over 600 currently and there should be close to 750 in the Summer.

3. ProQuest continues to add text to their database 676 last month for a total of 8,600 currently

4. 20 institutions have joined since January (12 EEBO, 8 Evans) including 10 ARLs

5. There is a demo for the ECCO-TCP containing 22 texts keyboarding vendors have been selected to commence at a rate of about 75 texts per month

6. Usage stats for the database continue to go up. There are 47,000 uses so far this year as compared to 29,000 this time last year (92,000 total for last year).

Shawn Martin then went into more detail on some of these points. He listed the new partners for EEBO-TCP: Dartmouth College, MIT, Skidmore College, Tulane University, University of British Columbia, University of California - Irvine, University of Nebraska, University of Ottawa, University of Southern California, Williams College, and York University and Evans-TCP: Baylor University, Claremont Colleges, Dartmouth College, Emory University, Simon Fraser University, Texas Christian University, UCLA, Utah State University, and Williams College.

Shawn also pointed out that Evans-TCP has been increasing its visibility in scholarship including a recent presentation on Evans and Evans-TCP in graduate teaching at the Society of Early Americanists in Spring of 2005.

Finally, Shawn demonstrated the new ECCO-TCP demo site available at http://www.hti.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/

Catherine Mardikes and Mark Olsen from the University of Chicago then demonstrated the implementation of EEBO-TCP texts into the PhiloLogic database at the University of Chicago and how partner institutions of the TCP can integrate texts into their own interfaces for local audiences and uses.

Martin Mueller, a professor of English at Northwestern University then talked about one particular use for his research. He works on historical linguistics and is using TCP and other texts to create spelling normalization on variants of early modern English and can quickly look at variants, manipulate text, and create concordances in a matter of seconds with TCP text and computer programs like PhiloLogic with much greater accuracy and speed than has ever before been possible.

TCP is very grateful for the insights and expertise of Martin Mueller, Catherine Mardikes, and Mark Olsen and is thankful for their willingness to come to the meeting and share their thoughts.



January 1, 2005

Evans-TCP is now available to partner institutions at http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/e/evans/. There are around 300 titles currently available and 150 are added bi-monthly.

January 16, 2005

Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in Boston, MA

The Text Creation Partnership held one meeting on January 16th with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex. The meeting was very well attended by representatives of current partner institutions, text conversion vendors, and those considering partnership.

The meeting opened with an introduction by Mark Sandler who thanked everyone for coming and talked about the Google digitization project now going forward at Michigan and Michigan's dedication to making digital access available.

Representatives from the three commercial publishers then spoke about their respective databases. Mary Sauer-Games from ProQuest mentioned that TCP texts have been loaded into their database and around 6,000 are currently available. Also, they had an excellent year for sales with consortiums in Canada and the Oberlin group buying EEBO and many of them coming into TCP as well. Remmel Nunn from Readex also talked about sales for the Evans and the Archive Americana project. Rich Foley from Gale then spoke about the ECCO project and a good year for them in sales as well too.

Shawn Martin then gave an update on the TCP projects.

1. It was an excellent year for TCP. Overall, 30 institutions joined the partnership last year. Since ALA Annual, the following institutions joined EEBO-TCP: Albion College, Bates College, Brown University, Bucknell University, Carleton College, Colby College, Earlham College, Mt. Holyoke College, National University of Ireland - Galway, Rollins College, St. Louis University, UC – Berkeley, University of Arizona, University of Arkansas, University of Maryland, University of Mississippi, University of Western Ontario, and Western Michigan University. The following joined Evans-TCP: Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, University of Connecticut, University of North Carolina – Greensboro, University of Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian College Association (representing over 30 colleges in the Appalachian region).

There are now nearly 8,000 texts available in EEBO-TCP. Around 500 are added bi-monthly, and there has been increased usage over the past year. Evans-TCP is now available to partner institutions at http://ets.umdl.umich.edu/e/evans/. There are around 300 titles currently available and 150 are added bi-monthly. TCP is beginning to start production on ECCO-TCP and we hope to have a demo by summer of 2005.

2. The Board of Directors also met in October of 2004 and discussed among many issues the evolving role of the Board given the addition of two new projects, the project budget, rights of use for publishers and scholarly projects to use TCP texts, a price increase for new partners scheduled to take place in April of 2005, how to include multiple editions of text when asked by scholars, and how to evolve the TCP model to fit larger community goals. The TCP is very grateful for the insights and advice of the Board members who include: Betty G. Bengtson
(Emeritus, University of Washington), David Braden (Readex Digital), Nancy Davenport (Council on Library and Information Resources), Richard Foley (Thomson-Gale), David S. Ferriero (New York Public Library), Marianne Gaunt (Rutgers University),William A. Gosling (Chair, University of Michigan), Deanna B. Marcum (Library of Congress), Sarah C. Michalak
( University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill), William Miller (Florida Atlantic University), Ronald Milne (University of Oxford), Carole Moore (University of Toronto), Mary Sauer-Games (ProQuest Information and Learning), David Stam (Syracuse University), and William D. Walker (University of Miami)

3. In January of 2005 the University of Chicago launched TCP texts into the PhiloLogic database available at http://lib.uchicago.edu/efts/EEBO/. This allows users the ability to gain access to the texts and manipulate it in new ways.

4. The winners of the EEBO in Undergraduate essay contest were

Grand Prize: Heidi Atwood – Washington College
Thy leaden heels no golden wit doth show:” Physick, Alchemy, and the Body Corporeal in Milton’s Paradise Lost

First Prize: Meghan Fadel – SUNY – Buffalo
Reason through the Unreasonable

Second Prize: Daniel Ward – University of Warwick
Literary Presentation of Political Events in Sir Thomas Durfey’s Sir Barnaby Whigg

Honorable Mention: Bianca Bonomi – University of Warwick
Literary presentation of political/religious events in John Dryden’s Amboyna

Honorable Mention: Charles Mallison – University of Southern California
With High Astounding Terms: Christopher Marlowe, Turkish Hysteria, and Subversion on the Elizabethan Stage.

Thanks also to our judges Katrien Daemen-de Gelder (Professor of English, University of Ghent), Julia Gardner (School of Information, University of Michigan), Arthur Kinney (Professor of English, University of Massachusetts), Hillary Nunn (Professor of English, University of Akron), Newton Key (Professor of English, Eastern Illinois University), and Kim Yates (Assistant Director, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto).

More information is available about the essay contest at http://www.lib.umich.edu/edu_essay.html.

The second half of the meeting was devoted to a roundtable discussion of the TCP in academic research and in teaching. TCP invited the following to give their perspectives on how such resources have been used in their work and how such things could be used as we move into the future:

Steven Bullock – Professor of History, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Ellen Dunlap – Director, American Antiquarian Society
Wayne Franklin – Professor of English, Northeastern University
Brendan Rapple – Collection Development Librarian, Boston College

We are very grateful for their insights and expertise and thankful for their willingness to come to the meeting and share their thoughts.

c

July 23, 2004

Evans-TCP Selection Task Force Report

 

Thursday, May 20 – Friday, May 21 2004

 

Faculty Participants:  Steven Bullock (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), Wayne Franklin (Northeastern University), Edward Griffin (University of Minnesota), David Hancock (University of Michigan), Leon Jackson (University of South Carolina), Michael Jarvis (University of Rochester), Karen Kupperman (New York University), Molly McCarthy (American Antiquarian Society Fellow), Meredith McGill (Rutgers University), Michael Warner (Rutgers University)

 

Librarian Participants: Nancy Godleski (Yale University), Marcia Pankake (University of Minnesota), Barbara Preece (Boston Library Consortium)

 

American Antiquarian Society Staff:  Nancy Burkett, Joanne Chaison, Alan Degutis, Ellen Dunlap, John Hench, Tom Knoles

 

University of Michigan Staff: Shawn Martin, Mark Sandler

 

Readex Staff:  Remmel Nunn, Caroline Reyes

 

Purpose:  To discuss and draft guidelines for selection of titles from the Evans Digital collection available from Readex for full text conversion in the Evans – Text Creation Partnership (TCP) collection.

 

Discussions:

 

The first day of discussion began with discussion of how electronic resources are used in the classroom and in research.  Particular attention was paid to the relationship between the Evans Digital product with its Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software and the full-text for the Evans-TCP and how to select materials that would benefit from having a richer text edition.  This led to a discussion of who the primary audience for the Evans-TCP is.  It was generally agreed that more advanced researchers (including faculty and graduate students) would want the breadth of the entire collection offered by Readex.  Members of the task force considered undergraduate students to be the primary audience for the TCP collection for several reasons.  First, they are most likely to want greater keyword searching.  Also, the digital images from Evans can be very difficult for novice readers and readers will eventually be able to see the TCP text in a modern font whereas they will not be able to see the OCR in the Readex product. Additionally, because EEBO-TCP editions will be owned by the academic community and will enter the public domain, the task force needed to consider which works from the Evans collection are most likely to be used and distributed in other kinds of academic projects and educational materials.  With these things in mind, it becomes important to create a collection that will have enduring value for teaching in the years to come.

 

Several approaches were considered such as using the genre lists and categorization already used in the Evans collection.  Also, since OCR is not as accurate as the fully keyboarded text, perhaps the quality of the OCR should be a consideration in selecting works for the TCP.  Others suggested the use of anthologies of American literature, primary citations in relevant scholarly literature, or the use of the genre lists in the Readex product.  Many thought it would be good to include everything of a particular genre like poetry and novels.  There was some concern, however, that this not be too focused on literature.  Some felt that other scholars, especially historians, needed to focus on materials like indentures and legal documents.  Additionally, it was important that there was a geographic and temporal balance.  Not only should all of the colonies be represented, but if there were materials relating to other parts of the British empire, like the Caribbean, they should be considered as well, and all time periods should be fairly represented so that it is not too slanted toward just the Revolutionary period.  A need for inclusion of seventeenth century materials was especially noted because those materials are so rare and difficult to obtain that there was a need for a full text edition of these titles.

 

Members of the TCP and the AAS then talked about the processes they have been using in both the Evans-TCP and an earlier project, the Early English Books Online (EEBO)-TCP.  Joanne Chaison from the AAS talked about the many bibliographies she had used and about her consultation with scholars.  Shawn Martin from TCP discussed the guidelines of the EEBO-TCP project.  Members of the task force then discussed some of the guidelines used so far and whether they should be continued into the Evans-TCP selection criteria, specifically what items could or should be excluded.  Examples of this would be titles in languages other than English and also subsequent editions.  It was decided that the Evans-TCP should follow more or less along the same lines of EEBO-TCP including only first editions unless there is a reason to do otherwise, and that no materials should be excluded because of language.  However, considering the length and number of Bibles and almanacs in the collection, it would probably be appropriate to exclude them from the TCP.

 

Then, since it had been mentioned several times, it was suggested that members brain storm some specific topics that might be of interest to potential users of the database.  Topics mentioned were Common Sense, the Federalist Papers, witchcraft, slavery, captivity narratives, the Great Awakening, Indians and European encounters with them, Indian treaties, primers, psalters, children’s literature, economic life, economic development, material culture and life, immigration, technology, the founding fathers, histories, election sermons, travel literature, novels, poetry, drama, exploration business literature, broadsides, natural history, the American Revolution, and colonial law. 

 

The second day of discussion focused almost entirely on drafting a set of guidelines for the future selection of Evans-TCP materials.  It was decided that the following should be set:

 

  1. Include all materials from the seventeenth century (assuming they can be transcribed)
  2. Include all other authors from the Bibliography of American Literature
  3. Consult other seminal anthologies like Heath, Norton, and MacMillan for other authors and titles
  4. Include only 1st editions (unless there is a compelling scholarly reason to do otherwise)
  5. Put out a survey to relevant scholars for inclusion of other materials and titles

 

It was decided that these guidelines should help to create a balanced corpus of material for the subset of items that will be transcribed in the Evans-TCP collection.  The AAS will be sending out a survey to relevant scholars requesting not only canonical works but also lesser known works and materials (like indentures and legal works) that should be included as well.  In all, this should help to build the Evans-TCP collection and the staff of both the AAS and TCP are extremely grateful for the time and effort of the people involved.  For further questions, information about this meeting or for suggestions of potential Evans-TCP titles, please contact evanstcp-info@umich.edu.

June 27, 2004

Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Annual Meeting in Orlando, FL

The Text Creation Partnership held two meetings on June 27th with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex. Both were well attended by representatives of current partner institutions, text conversion vendors, and those considering partnership.

The meeting opened with an introduction by Mark Sandler who thanked everyone for coming and introduced Bill Gosling, University Librarian at the University of Michigan and Chair of the EEBO-TCP Advisory Board. Bill talked about the tremendous impact the project has had on teaching and research and noted the contributions of partners both in North America and the UK, most notably Oxford University, our EEBO-TCP project partner in the UK. Perry Willett, the new Director of Digital Library Production Services at the University of Michigan then spoke about the efforts and insights of DLPS and their tremendous amount of expertise and dedication to the project.

Shawn Martin then began updates on the three products and projects. Mary Sauer-Games from ProQuest talked about the new interface and loading of text that ProQuest has recently done and how much it has and will continue to enhance the EEBO product for students and researchers; Remmel Nunn from Readex discussed the development of the Evans product, and Rich Foley talked about the partnership with TCP and the development of the ECCO product from Gale.

EEBO-TCP

  1. Since January of 2004, fourteen new partners have joined the partnership including Carleton University, Middlebury College, Ohio University, Simon Fraser University, SUNY - Buffalo, Swarthmore College, UCLA, University of Calgary, University of Manitoba, University of Saskatchewan, University of Victoria, University of Waterloo, Washington College, and Wesleyan University. This includes a large number of Canadian University from the Consortium of Prairie and Pacific Libraries in Western Canada.
  2. EEBO-TCP has added hundreds of new texts and now includes 6,499 new texts including seminal (and very large) works like Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle and John Foxe's Actes and Monuments
  3. EEBO-TCP has also started new partnerships for the review of foreign language titles at the University of Toronto and the National Library of Wales.
  4. Michigan, Toronto, and the University of North Carolina have downloaded the nearly 1,800 records for EEBO-TCP and Michigan and Toronto have put them into their online catalogs. Toronto has also included these records in Iter (a gateway to renaissance studies database). Partner institutions are welcome to ask for instructions and integrating records, and we'll be happy to help
  5. Some universities have also begun loading not just the records but the texts as well into their own local interfaces. It has always been part of the vision of TCP that institutions would download texts and make copies available in their own local systems. Now, it is beginning to happen. For others who may be interested, you can contact TCP for more information
  6. Shawn then announced the October 31st deadline for the EEBO in undergraduate studies essay contest. Some have expressed interest in moving the deadline. November and early January were given as suggestions. It will remain Oct. 31st for this year, but is open to change for next year, and we welcome suggestions.

Evans

  1. 124 texts are currently in the development site and will soon be available to the subscribing partners
  2. Over 1,200 texts have been selected by the American Antiquarian Society and are in the process of being transcribed and put online.
  3. 3 universities have joined the partnership including Brigham Young, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Colorado.
  4. There was a task force for selection of Evans materials held in May of 2004. More information will be available on the Evans-TCP site.
  5. Shawn demonstrated the Evans-TCP production site showing how ultimately the two will work together by allowing enhanced searching for researchers and giving added numbers of hits to basic searches.

ECCO-TCP

  1. Mark Sandler and Rich Foley then discussed the ECCO-TCP which continues to develop and Gale and TCP will continue to work together to develop content and structure for the ECCO-TCP initiative.

Finally, Robert Hatch, a professor of the history of science at the University of Florida discussed his own use of EEBO-TCP in research and in teaching. He demonstrated his website and how he uses it in classes. He then helped to lead the group in a discussion of how TCP could be used in classroom teaching, and how librarians and scholars can work together to promote and develop these resources. We're very grateful for Prof. Hatch's insights and expertise, and thank him again for his willingness to come to the meeting.

February 3, 2004

TCP has released its latest newsletter for winter 2004.

The TCP has released a new newsletter for Winter of 2004 containing general updates for the EEBO-TCP, Evans-TCP projects, and an announcement of ECCO-TCP. This newsletter is 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.

January 15, 2004

Minutes of the TCP Meetings at the ALA Midwinter Meeting in San Diego, CA

The Text Creation Partnership held two meetings in San Diego on January 10th and 11th. One held in the Westin Horton Plaza with representatives from ProQuest, Gale, and Readex, and a smaller one in the ProQuest suite at the San Diego Marriott. Both were well attended by representatives of both current partner institutions and those considering partnership.

The meeting opened with an introduction by Mark Sandler who thanked people for coming, discussed the tremendous development and scope that the TCP project had taken recently and introduced representatives from the three commercial publishers ProQuest, Readex, and Thomson-Gale.

Ron Klausner, President of ProQuest Information and Learning then greeted attendees and discussed ProQuest's role in both the TCP and in teaching and learning among its customers. ProQuest is excited to be a part of this and looks forward to continuing to promote scholarship through its initiatives.

At the meeting on the 10th, Ron was then followed by Rich Foley from Gale and Mark Sandler (who spoke on behalf of Readex). All of whom expressed their excitement to be involved with this initiative and their continued hopes for the success of the project.

Bill Gosling, University Librarian at the University of Michigan then talked about the role the project had played in scholarship and the tremendous leadership that the project had displayed as a model for future collaboration. He especially thanked Mark Sandler for his continued leadership in the development of this initative.

Shawn Martin then discussed the current developments in the three initiatives.

 

EEBO

  1. Since June of 2003, six new partners had joined the partnership including Dalhousie University, Georgetown University, the University of Alabama, the University of Alberta, the University of Guelph, and the University of North Carolina - Greensboro
  2. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) also joined the partnership on behalf of over 180 higher and further education institutions in the UK. Its committments will open up the partnership to hundreds of scholars and students as well as fund the production of 4,000 new texts.
  3. Production of new texts has also increased significantly. Currently, there are 4,915 every month; an average of 548 new texts are being produced every two months, and by the ALA Annual over 6,000 new texts will have been produced.
  4. The EEBO-TCP Governing Board also met in October of 2003. Among other things, it discussed the current state of the project over the past few years and the development of the project for the future. The Board affirmed that the project has had made significant progress and is dedicated to helping the TCP develop further in order to meet its project goals. Minutes of the Board meeting are available at http://www.lib.umich.edu/eebo/News/Board_10_22_Minutes.html
  5. A task force on selection also met over the summer of 2003 to discuss current selection strategies. It determined that the current selection strategies had worked very well, but made several suggestions on improving them including topical selection guidelines and increasing contact with relevant scholars. Minutes of the selection task force meeting are available at http://www.lib.umich.edu/eebo/News/Task_Force_Report.html
  6. Shawn then announced the winners of the EEBO in Undergraduate studies essay competition. One judge said he was "astounded" by the quality of the essays and all of the essays demonstrate the amount of hard work undergraduates can do and the level of research they can accomplish, rivaling in some cases even doctoral candidates. A list of winners and their essays is available at http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/edu/edu_win_03.html

Evans

  1. The Evans Project has continued to progress well and new updates have been made on the Evans site at http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/evans
  2. The American Antiquarian Society has developed selection guidelines and strategies for the Evans project and has consistently met its selection goals. It continues to be a valuable source of knowledge for the Evans-TCP
  3. The vendors are now keyboarding around 200 texts for inclusion in the project, and Evans-TCP hopes to have a corpus of texts ready by summer.

ECCO

  1. Having just announced the ECCO-TCP project, a website has been developed for the project at http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/ecco which will continue to be updated as the project progresses.

Jo-Anne Hogan from ProQuest then talked about ProQuest's new interface just released in the autumn and talked about how ProQuest was able to integrate TCP texts into their database and the advantages that this has brought to their users. TCP is very happy to have this cooperation with ProQuest and looks forward to the possibilities that integration with the images will bring both to the use of TCP text as well as to the scholarly community.

Mark Sandler then discussed the future development of the project and how he continues to see it growing and serving as a model for the future. One example of this is the recent partnership with Thomson-Gale, but more may happen. It is exciting to see this idea move further, and both Mark and the partners of the project look forward to seeing how TCP develops over the next few years.

Finally, attendees of the meeting discussed how EEBO-TCP has been used in scholarship and teaching in their classrooms and what has been done to promote use of the database on campus. We would especially like to thank Jeff Garrett (Northwestern), Tom Izbicki (Johns Hopkins), and Bob Scott (Columbia) for their hard work in promoting this project to their scholars and for their willingness to contribute to the discussion.

August 19, 2003

Evans-TCP is pleased to announce the commencement of Evans-TCP production. Staff from the Evans-TCP recently talked with staff from the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), the selectors for the Evans-TCP), and will be beginning production of the first round of Evans titles very soon. Vendors have already been chosen and the titles have been selected, and the Evans-TCP project anticipates having a fully functional database site ready by sometime early next year.

 

July 2, 2003

Evans-TCP now has 28 new partners including:

American University
Baylor University
Boston College
Bucknell University
Columbia University
Cornell University
Duke University
Gettysburg College
Indiana University
McGill University
Northwestern University
Ohio State University
Pennsylvania State University
Princeton University
Reed College
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
University of Pennsylvania
Vanderbilt University
Vassar College
Yale University

Thanks to everyone who has committed to joining the Evans-TCP; we look forward to working with you!

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!

March, 2003
TCP ANNOUNCES EVANS TEXT INITIATIVE
The University of Michigan, NewsBank/Readex Co., and the American Antiquarian Society are happy to announce that the Text Creation Partnership will be creating texts for the Evans Early American Imprint Collection, a highly regarded short title catalog containing 40,000 early American Imprints. Readex has already made the digital images available and over 50 institutions subscribed shortly after its release.

The Text Creation Partnership envisions keyboarding 6,000 of these works according to the standards already developed in the Evans Project. We look forward to making this important corpus even more accessible. For more information, please contact Shawn Martin at shawnmar@umich.edu