Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition: Report on the TIDSR Benchmarking Study

Abstract

The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) was established in 1999, as a collaborative project involving the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, the commercial publisher ProQuest and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The aim of the Text Creation Partnership was to create fully searchable XML-encoded transcriptions of the image sets of early printed books which form the basis for ProQuest's Early English Books Online. The Bodleian Libraries and the Oxford Internet Institute sought and received funding from JISC under their Digital Preservation and Curation programme for the SECT: Sustaining the EEBO-TCP Corpus in Transition project. The first stage of the SECT project was to carry out a benchmarking study of the impact and use of EEBO-TCP, using the OII’s Toolkit for the Impact of Digital Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), itself a JISC-funded initiative. The study concentrated primarily on the use and impact of EEBO-TCP in the UK. This report outlines the results of the TIDSR study, which will be used as a basis for the creation of practical recommendations for improvements to EEBO-TCP, focussing on how best to secure the long-term sustainability of the corpus.

Keywords: impact, measurement, digital libraries