Early English Books Online

The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is a not-for-profit organization based in the library of the University of Michigan since 2000^[update]. 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.

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 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.

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