TCP EEBO, EECO and Evans texts

From the 1 January 2015 the first phase of EEBO-TCP (Early English Books Online - Text Creation Partnership) transcribed books entered the public domain. They join those created by ECCO-TCP (Eighteenth Century Collections Online - Text Creation Partnership) and Evans-TCP (Evans Early American Imprints - Text Creation Partnership). The goal of the Text Creation Partnership is to create accurate XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of early printed books. They transcribe and encode the page images of books from ProQuest's Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage's Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex's Evans Early American Imprints. The work the TCP does, and hence the resulting transcriptions that they create, are jointly funded and owned by more than 150 libraries worldwide. Eventually all of the TCP's work will be placed into the public domain for anyone to use and the release of Phase 1 of EEBO-TCP is a milestone in this process. The TCP began in 1999 as a partnership among the libraries of the University of Michigan and the University of Oxford, ProQuest, and the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). As and when TCP texts have entered into the public domain we have made them available at the Oxford Text Archive. This was already distributing the public domain copies of ECCO-TCP, and now adds the phase one of EEBO-TCP and Evans-TCP this collection. The hard work of managing the creation, encoding, checking, and providing the texts have been done by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan Library, while the Academic IT group of IT Services at the University of Oxford has undertaken the task of bringing the encoding into full conformance with the Text Encoding Initiative P5 Guidelines and making the results available in various forms.