Bodleian Libraries secures £1million JISC award for extension to create searchable corpus of the earliest books published in English

The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford has secured a £1 million award from JISC Collections to create a complete corpus of searchable electronic texts for the earliest books published in English. This funding enables the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP), led by the Bodleian and the University of Michigan, to make available a further 43,500 early printed texts as part of their project to make all English publications printed before 1700 available to scholars in searchable electronic form. This additional £1 million award recognises the success of the initial EEBO-TCP project which made accessible over 25,000 titles published between 1473 and 1700 and which has, in the words of one scholar, 'condensed what would previously have taken a lifetime of research and cross-referencing into an afternoon’s work.'