EEBO Frequently Asked Questions


What is EEBO-TCP?

Early English Books Online (EEBO) is widely used by academics to see images of 125,000 books held in libraries across the world. It also allows the user to search through citations, but not within the text of the books. The aim of the EEBO Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is to make full text and other searches possible across 25,000 accurately transcribed books. (Click here if you want to find out more about how texts are selected.)

The TCP encodes the books in XML with a version of the TEI, allowing researchers to limit their searches to headings, verse, quotations, particular sections of a book or books, and so on.

How is the project funded?

Institutions wishing to make use of the texts created by the project sign up to the TCP. There is a fee for this, which is used to fund the project. If you are interested in joining the project, or if you would like more information, please contact us. The JISC help to make the EEBO-TCP available to academic institutions in the UK.

What are the benefits to research?

The primary strength of the EEBO-TCP is that the resulting file of converted text will be owned by the creating partners. This means that it will be available to your campus for local load and modification, will convey very full rights for scholarly use (including full downloading for the purpose of creating new editions), and will permit distribution beyond individual campuses if that is judged desirable by the partners.

Once encoded, the texts are linked to EEBO page images, allowing users to see features of the facsimile while enjoying the benefits of keyword searching. As a result, scholars are able to pinpoint even minute references to their subjects as they appeared in a wide variety of early modern works. The search interface also allows scholars to uncover repeated word patterns across texts that ten years ago were only available in archives or on microfilm.

How is the project administered?

The EEBO-TCP Governing Board is comprised of 10–12 highly respected research library director-level members. Policy decisions affecting the quality, cost-effectiveness, and intellectual property rights of the partners are made by the Board.

Task Forces have looked into text selection, the DTD, and interface design.

How do I get more information?

Most of the Information on this page has been taken from http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/. This is the site developed by the University of Michigan, and it contains detailed information about the project and a demonstration site. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us in Oxford (see our Contact Page) or the team in Michigan.

Which interface should I use?

If you are unsure of which interface to use, click here for guidance.

Can I use my ATHENS password to access EEBO-TCP from home?

EEBO-TCP authentication is done by IP address, so you can't use your ATHENS password to access EEBO. If you want to access EEBO from home you should either use the Oxford University Computing Service Dial Up Service or use the OUCS VPN Service. For further information see http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/vpn/. However, please be aware that the EEBO texts can be very large and take a long time to download over a modem. The largest texts could cause your modem to crash.

How do I download several page images from the EEBO site?

Once you have found the text you want to download, tick the box beside that text and then click on the Marked List option on the black bar at the top. When the details of your desired text appear, click PDF download button. Select the pages you want and then click the Download button. (Texts of over 50 images must be downloaded in batches.)

How do I search for all the works by a certain author within the EEBO-TCP interface?

Click on the Search button. From the drop-down list, select Bibliography Search. You will then have the option to do a search for title, author, citation and/or subject.

Are there any further tips for using the EEBO-TCP interface?

Consult the Word Index to find alternative spellings for search forms.

Add titles to Bookbag to create subsets for more focused searching.

Try using * to truncate, u instead of v, vv instead of w, and i instead of j.

^ means superscript, ^^ means subscript, | means a hyphen, and + means the printer omitted the hyphen.

The help pages on the interface itself are very clear and well worth reading.

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