[Sca-cooks] Re: [Sca-cooks]EEBO project (LONG)

[johnna holloway]

Here is some more information on EEBO--
I have not mentioned it on the list
because it's not complete, it's hard to use,
it's expensive and limited to certain
academic libraries, and while it may in
the future provide us with lots of material
it's going to be a while...

Proquest is what UMI--is now known by..
they are the people who microfilm dissertations
and newspapers. They started a project decades
ago to film works contained in Pollard
 and Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue of
 Books Printed in English  up to 1640.
This project was known as:
 Early English Books I (Pollard and Redgrave, STC I),
  1475-1640. There was also Early English Books II
 (Wing, STC II), 1641-1700, An Extension of
 STC I  Based on Donald  Wing's Short-Title
 Catalogue of English-language Books which covered
books in English up until 1700.
EEB I has 2,088 reels to date... each reel contains a number
of works.

For EEBO...
What they have done is used the archival
master microfilms that they did for the
Early English BOOKS project.... and scanned
those images...which means that if the
microform master was a lousy one then the
scanned images are also lousy...Print show
through etc....
Here is part of the PR description-----

The University of Michigan, Oxford University, Council on Library and
Information Resources (CLIR), and ProQuest Information and Learning
are engaged in an exceptional partnership to provide robust access to a
major cultural archive. ProQuest Information and Learning has created
digital images for the 125,000 titles in the English Short Title
Catalog,
which includes English language texts from 1475-1700 listed in Wing,
Pollard and Redgrave, and the Thomason Tracts.

Working together, the University of Michigan and the University of
Oxford have proposed an international initiative supported by the
research library community to create structured SGML text files for a
significant portion of this collection, and are serving as production
sites for
the project.

25,000 volumes have been targeted for conversion over a five year
period. The encoded texts will link to the ProQuest Information and
Learning images. Completed texts will be loaded and delivered to the
partners through ProQuest Information and Learning, Michigan, or
Oxford.
from http://www.lib.umich.edu/eebo/

A list of the partner institutions is listed at:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/eebo/partners.html
that list will tell you if your university is signed up.

Finally here are the key parts---
Description & Goals
 Why Create Encoded EEBO Text?
Benefits for Libraries:
The significance of the STC collections (English language texts from
1475-1700), along with the scale of the digital conversion in both image
and text, will make this the most ambitious and scholarly significant
conversion effort undertaken to date (a prominent scholar at the
University of Michigan has called it "transforming"). We are asking the
library community to embrace the proposed text creation partnership as a
means of affirming the following goals:

 To accelerate the conversion of the STC collection from image to
text format

 Benefits for Scholarly Researchers:

 The partnership's efforts will allow full text searching of a
significant
 portion of the works in EEBO, an online corpus that already makes
available page images of the titles published between 1475 and 1700
listed in Pollard and Redgrave, Wing, and the Thomason Tracts catalogs.
Once encoded, the text will be linked to EEBO page images, thereby
allowing users to see features of the facsimile while enjoying the
benefits
of keyword searching. As a result, scholars will be able to pinpoint
even
minute references to their subjects as they appeared in a wide variety
of
early modern works. The search interface will also allow scholars to
uncover repeated word patterns across texts that ten years ago were only
available in archives or on microfilm.

Keyboarding

 Why Do EEBO texts need to be keyboarded?
The page images that make up Early English Books Online are displayed
in a form legible to human users, but computers themselves see the words
on EEBO's pages as simple squiggles that cannot be identified as
letters.
As a result, the search tools that users have come to associate with
word
processing and computer-based indices cannot sort the information on
EEBO pages.
from:http://www.lib.umich.edu/eebo/description.html

So, it's early days yet for the project.

Hope this helps explain the project. I can discuss it further
at the conference in Windsor.

Johnna Holloway   Johnnae llyn Lewis

Gaylin Walli wrote:
 There's really no info
> on this site for how to use the system if you're just a
> common schmoe. The free content is nice (though I
> wish they'd done a better job of scanning the Tusser
> manuscript, dammit!) but if I wanted EEBO access,
> do you know how I would get it? I can't seem to get
> that info off the site.> Iasmin