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

Tue Apr 26 13:53:24 UTC 2011

I confirm: this is a close consortium collaborative effort with no
public access at this time, and even extrapolating, one can fear that
the future public access will be limited to the surface (an interactive
presentation of the laid out text) and no open access for the sources
(the TEI XML encoded text and the layout software).

This has in my opinion to be checked before it can be endorsed by
OKF/CKAN, no ?

Philippe Aigrain

Le 26/04/2011 15:46, John Levin a écrit :
> 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