Monday, January 28, 2008

Early English Books Online and the Text Creation Partnership

Users of Early English Books Online (EEBO) know that the database contains the full text of more than 100,000 English-language books printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700. However, because much of this full-text material is presented in image file formats such as GIF, PDF, or TIFF, it is not fully keyword searchable. This is where the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) comes in. Dalhousie is a member of the TCP and has been contributing to a project that will eventually see 25,000 EEBO documents made available as completely searchable ASCII text. Users will be able to view both the transcribed text and the corresponding original page images. 11,500 documents have so far been "SGML encoded" by the TCP. The University of Michigan hosts a search interface where users can search this full-text segment of EEBO.

Try searching Early English Books Online at the Text Creation Partnership website.

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