The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is a not-for-profit organization based in the library of the University of Michigan since 2000. Its purpose is to produce large-scale full-text electronic resources (especially in the humanities) on behalf of both member institutions (particularly academic libraries) and scholarly publishers, under an arrangement calculated to serve the needs of both, and in so doing to demonstrate the value of a business model that sees corporate and non-profit information-providers as potentially amicable collaborators rather than as antagonistic vendors and customers respectively.
Projects TCP has sponsored four text-creation projects to date. The first and the largest is "EEBO-TCP (Phase I)" (2001–2009), an effort to produce structurally marked-up full-text transcriptions of 25,000+ of the roughly 125,000 books to be found either in the Pollard and Redgrave and Wing short-title catalogues of early English printed books, or among the Thomason Tracts, that is, from among nearly all books, pamphlets, and broadsides published in English or in England before 1700. The books were selected and transcribed from the digital scans produced by ProQuest Information and Learning, and distributed by them as a web-based product under the name "Early English Books Online" (EEBO). The scans from which the texts were transcribed were themselves made from the microfilm copies made over the years by ProQuest and its antecedent companies, including the original University Microfilms, Inc. EEBO-TCP Phase I concluded at the end of 2009, having transcribed about 25,300 titles, and immediately moved into EEBO-TCP Phase II (2009–), a sequel project dedicated to converting all the remaining unique English-language monographs (roughly 45,000 additional titles). The third TCP project was Evans-TCP (2003–2007, with some ongoing work through 2010), an effort to transcribe 6,000 of the 36,000 pre-1800 titles listed in Charles Evans' American Bibliography, and distributed, again as page images scanned from microfilm copies, by Readex, a division of NewsBank, Inc. under the name "Archive of Americana" ("Early American Imprints, series I: Evans, 1639–1800"). Evans-TCP has produced e-texts of nearly 5,000 books. The final TCP project was ECCO-TCP (2005–2010, with some work ongoing), an effort to transcribe 10,000 eighteenth-century books from among the 136,000 titles available in Thomson-Gale's web-based resource, "Eighteenth-Century Collections Online" (ECCO). ECCO-TCP ran out of funding in 2010 after transcribing about 3,000 (and editing about 2,400) titles.
Project commonalities All four TCP text projects are very similar. In each case:
The TCP produces text from commercial image files that have in turn been created from microfilm copies of early books. The commercial image providers receive what is in effect a full-text index to their image product for much less than it would cost to produce themselves: value added to their product. The partner libraries actually own, rather than simply license, the resultant texts, and are free (subject to some conditions) to mount the texts themselves in whatever system they like, or use the texts internally as a tool of scholarship and teaching. The texts are created according to library-determined standards, uniform across multiple data-sets and potentially cross-searchable. Because they are created collaboratively, the texts are relatively inexpensive (on a per-book basis) and become more so with each library that joins the partnership. The texts will eventually be made freely accessible to the public at large. The selection of texts to convert, though differing from project to project, in each case follows similar principles: variety, significance, representative quality, avoidance of duplication; specific requests from faculty or scholarly initiatives at member institutions are also generally honored. TCP has been hitherto primarily interested in creating texts, not in creating a "product"; though texts from all three projects are or will be mounted on servers at the University of Michigan library, the Michigan site is not the official TCP site: any partner library with adequate resources and safeguards may do the same. EEBO-TCP texts, for example, are served by Michigan, ProQuest, the Oxford University Digital Library, and the University of Chicago.
Organization The TCP is overseen by a Board of Directors, drawn chiefly from senior library administrators at partner institutions, representatives of the corporate partners, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The Board is assisted in matters of selection and scholarship by an academic advisory group that includes faculty in the fields of early modern English and American studies. The TCP has informal ties to a number of University-based scholarly text projects, especially in helping to provide them with source texts with which to work. Institutions represented include Northwestern University, University of Oxford, Washington University in St. Louis, University of Sydney, University of Toronto, and University of Victoria. TCP has also worked with students by sponsoring an Undergraduate Essay Contest every year, convening task forces on the uses of TCP texts in pedagogy, and appealing to scholars and students for ideas on selection and use. Text production is managed through the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Service (DLPS), with its extensive experience in the production of SGML/XML-encoded electronic texts. DLPS is assisted by University of Oxford's Bodleian Digital Libraries Systems & Services (BDLSS), including the late Sebastian Rahtz. Small part-time production operations have also been started within two other libraries: the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies in Pratt Library (Victoria University in the University of Toronto), specializing in Latin books; and the National Library of Wales (Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru) in Aberystwyth, specializing in Welsh books.
Standards All four TCP text projects are produced in the same way and to the same standards, which are documented, at least in part, on the TCP web site.
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