[open-humanities] 18th-century texts online accessible

[John Levin]

On 26/04/2011 13:47, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> On 26 April 2011 11:30, Janneke Adema<ademaj at uni.coventry.ac.uk>  wrote:
>>
>> This is amazing news:
>>
>> 2000-odd 18th-century texts, formerly in databases, are now publicly accessible: http://ow.ly/4H0Ux
>> Via 18th connect: www.18thconnect.org
>
> This is indeed great news. Direct link for source project is here:
> <http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/ecco/description.html>
>
> Anyone up for creating a<http://ckan.net/>  entry for this new resource:
>
> <http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/ecco/description.html>
>
> (Would be good as part of this to clarify the exact license terms and
> whether these are fully open -- AFAICT you do at least need to request
> the texts by email -- they are not yet posted online).
>
> Rufus

There seems to be some licensing 'information' here:
http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/description.html
Quote:
Licensing and Access

The EEBO-TCP project is notable for creating quality electronic editions 
of culturally significant content of enduring value. It is also notable 
for doing so under terms that foster scholarly use and widespread 
access. Partner institutions are co-owners of the textfile and are 
entitled to copies of that file for local loading and management. After 
an exclusive licensing period granted to Proquest comes to a close, 
partners can treat the file as if locally created and can distribute the 
texts freely. Our cooperative agreement with ProQuest is intended to 
protect their investment in the EEBO project while supporting the 
principle of public domain access to early texts. For partner 
institutions not yet prepared to support a local implementation of 
searchable EEBO-TCP texts, access is presently provided without charge 
by libraries at the Universities of Michigan and Oxford. Partners can 
search TCP editions at these sites and retrieve both relevant text 
portions and corresponding page images. ProQuest also provides an 
interface through which to search to the subset of keyed and encoded 
texts, along with page images of the entire collection.

As far as I can tell, these texts have *NOT* been freely and openly 
released, whether judged by license or access. As far as I can tell, the 
texts are nowhere to be found on the internet without a specific 
university log-in. I've sent an email requesting them from 18th Century 
connect as per this page:
http://www.18thconnect.org/news/?p=49
and if I get them, will let the list know.

John
-- 
John Levin
http://www.anterotesis.com
johnlevin at joindiaspora.com
http://twitter.com/anterotesis