Text Creation Partnership

Text Creation Partnership
Name	Text Creation Partnership
Founded	1999
Location	United States
Type	Scholarly digitization initiative
Partners	Universities, libraries, publishers

Text Creation Partnership

Overview

The Text Creation Partnership operates as a large-scale collaboration among institutions such as Library of Congress, Yale University, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Michigan, Boston Public Library, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Columbia University, New York Public Library, British Library, Stanford University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Washington University in St. Louis, University of California, Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Virginia, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Rice University, University of Arizona, University of Colorado Boulder, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, Emory University to transcribe and prepare machine-readable texts from historical collections such as Early English Books Online, Evans Early American Imprint Collection, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century Pamphlets, Making of America, Projected English Drama Collections to support research by scholars and cultural institutions including Society of American Archivists, Modern Language Association, American Historical Association, Association of Research Libraries, Council on Library and Information Resources, Digital Public Library of America, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, JSTOR, ProQuest, Gale Cengage, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, SAGE Publications, Elsevier, Springer Nature, IEEE, ACM, American Antiquarian Society, Bodleian Libraries, Folger Shakespeare Library, British Library Sound Archive.

History and Development

The initiative began in the late 1990s with funding and coordination involving organizations such as National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Library and Archives Canada, British Library, Wellcome Trust, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and technology partners including OCLC, ExLibris, Innovative Interfaces, Preservation Technologies, IBM, Microsoft Research, Google Books, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Corporation, Red Hat, Sun Microsystems, HP, Intel Corporation, Bell Labs, AT&T Laboratories, Siemens, Accenture, Deloitte to convert scanned images into searchable text for projects tied to collections such as Early English Books Online, Evans Early American Imprints, ESTC, ECCO, NAPL and catalogs like WorldCat, Library of Congress Online Catalog, JSTOR Project MUSE, Google Scholar, SSRN for use in academic research promoted at conferences like Digital Humanities Conference, Society for Textual Scholarship Annual Conference, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Association of College and Research Libraries Annual Conference.

Collections and Content

The corpus includes facsimiles and transcriptions of works from printers and publishers represented in holdings of institutions such as Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Evans Early American Imprints, Stratford-upon-Avon playhouses records, Stationers' Company registers, London Gazette archives, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Proceedings of the Old Bailey, British Parliamentary Papers, Johns Hopkins Press publications, Cambridge University Press monographs, Oxford University Press editions, Ashgate Publications, CUP Papers on History, Renaissance drama collections, Enlightenment pamphlets, Victorian periodicals, antebellum American pamphlets, colonial newspapers, Harvard Library holdings, Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Bodleian Libraries Special Collections, Folger Shakespeare Library Folios, American Antiquarian Society Collections, Newberry Library, Morgan Library & Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division encompassing printed items, serials, broadsides, pamphlets, and early maps.

Partnerships and Contributors

Key institutional contributors include University of Michigan Library Digital Library Production Service, University of Illinois Rare Book Office, Harvard College Library, Yale Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, British Library, Bodleian Libraries, New York Public Library, American Antiquarian Society, Folger Shakespeare Library, HathiTrust Digital Library, Internet Archive, OCLC Research, JSTOR, Gale Cengage, ProQuest, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, University of Chicago Press, Columbia University Press, Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Stanford University Press, Duke University Press, University of Pennsylvania Press, Routledge, Taylor & Francis, Springer Nature, Elsevier along with funding and policy guidance from National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Institute of Museum and Library Services, Council on Library and Information Resources, National Science Foundation, Library of Congress and standards bodies such as Text Encoding Initiative, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, International Image Interoperability Framework, Open Archives Initiative.

Access, Licensing, and Use

Materials are distributed under agreements involving repositories and publishers including HathiTrust, Internet Archive, JSTOR, Gale, ProQuest, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Springer Nature, Elsevier, Wolters Kluwer, Taylor & Francis Group, SAGE Publications with metadata practices aligned to Dublin Core, METS, MODS, PREMIS, TEI Guidelines, IIIF for interoperability with services such as WorldCat, Discovery Service platforms at Columbia University, Primo, Summon, EDS and integrated into research infrastructures like HPC centers at NSF-funded facilities, XSEDE, Amazon Web Services Research Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure for Research subject to rights frameworks influenced by U.S. Copyright Office, Berne Convention, Copyright Term Extension Act and institutional policies at Yale University, Harvard University, University of Michigan, Library of Congress, British Library.

Impact and Reception

Scholars in fields represented by Renaissance studies, Enlightenment scholarship, American Studies, Literary criticism, Book history, Print culture, Digital humanities, Historical linguistics, Computational philology, Bibliography, Early modern studies, Victorian studies, Colonial American history, Legal history, Religious studies, Musicology, Cartography, Sociology of knowledge, Publishing history have used the texts in projects referenced at venues like Digital Humanities Conference, Modern Language Association Annual Convention, American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Society for Textual Scholarship Annual Conference, Computational Linguistics Conference and in journals such as Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Early Modern Literary Studies, American Historical Review, Journal of Modern History, Speculum, Modern Philology, ELH, PMLA, Victorian Studies, Book History influencing teaching at Harvard University, Yale University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, University of Chicago, Columbia University, Princeton University, Stanford University and inspiring follow-on projects like HathiTrust Research Center, DPLA, British Library Labs, Bodleian Libraries Digital Library, Chicago Text Lab with ongoing debate about OCR accuracy, editorial standards, licensing practices, and access models among stakeholders including publicly funded libraries, private presses, academic consortia.

Category:Digital humanities projects