ECCO-TCP is a partnership with Gale, part of Cengage Learning, to produce highly accurate, fully-searchable, SGML/XML-encoded texts from among the 150,000 titles available in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) database.
ECCO
ECCO includes every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during the 18th century, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. The database contains more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes in all. In addition, ECCO natively supports OCR-based full-text searching of this corpus.
ECCO-TCP
With the support of more than 35 libraries, the TCP keyed and encoded 2,231 ECCO-TCP texts. In cooperation with Gale Cengage, these texts have already been made freely available to the public.
Because there are no longer any restrictions on how the ECCO-TCP texts may be used and shared, many users have already begun to make this data and metadata available in various forms and formats around the Web:
- Search, browse, or read from the ECCO-TCP corpus through the University of Michigan Library’s DLXS platform (Original ECCO-TCP partners will also be able to link from the full-text view to the corresponding ECCO page images)
- Search the ECCO-TCP corpus and view results via ARTFL‘s PhiloLogic search engine (Thanks to Robert Morrissey)
- Download the original SGML/XML encoded texts and headers from the TCP (encoded using a customization of TEI P3)
- Download TEI P5 XML, EPUB, plain text, or HTML for each text from the Oxford Text Archive (Thanks to Sebastian Rahtz)
- Download plain text files (stripped of XML markup) and an index containing metadata from the Data Hub (Thanks to 18thConnect for distributing the plain text files, and to John Levin for making them available in a central, open location)
- Bibliographic information associated with these texts is available as Open Linked Data (specifically, RDF), making it possible to link books, people, places, etc., mentioned in ECCO metadata with other related data online (thanks to Keith Alexander)
We hope that at least one of these options will meet your research needs, but we also welcome your questions, suggestions, and requests for alternatives (or, we hope you’ll build something that works for you, and let us know about it!)