Electronic Text Center Discussion Group at ALA

[Bob Scott]

If you are going to be at the American Library Association Annual 
Convention in Orlando, I urge you to attend the meeting of the Library 
Electronic Text Center Discussion Group, scheduled for Saturday, June 
26, from 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. in Room 223 B of the Orange County Convention 
Center. (Note the shift away from our usual time slot, due to 
circumstances beyond our control.)

The topic of discussion will be the Text Creation Partnership, a joint 
undertaking by a large group of American and British research libraries 
that represents an important new model for digital library development. 
The aim of this project is a common database of fully marked-up and 
searchable texts drawn from three commercial collections  ProQuest's 
Early English Books Online (EEBO), Readex's Evans Digital Edition, and 
Thomson Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Together, 
those databases mark a sea change in the development of digital library 
collections, as they bring into play a vast, increasingly comprehensive 
corpus of the universe of book publication in the English-speaking world 
prior to 1800, a body of resources that is clearly an essential 
component of a national digital library. In pursuit of its goals, the 
TCP has already made significant progress in developing fruitful 
collaboration between the academic and commercial publishing worlds, 
fostering cooperation among publishers, implementing standards for 
textual markup, and fostering the interoperability of dispersed 
resources. Many new opportunities and challenges lie ahead: the prospect 
of a similar treatment of 19th century resources, the possibility of 
drawing in the work of other publishers, the need to ensure broader 
access to these collections, and the unending need for development of 
the search tools to master an increasingly large body of material.

With us to discuss these developments will be Mark Sandler, collection 
development officer and Shawn Martin, project outreach librarian, and 
perhaps other members of the staff. I hope that you will be able to attend.

(I also encourage you to come with suggestions for a topic for our 
mid-winter discussion.)

Bob Scott
Head, Electronic Text Service
Columbia University Libraries
Telephone: 212-854-7547
Email: scottr at columbia.edu