Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is an archive of electronic texts and other literary and language resources which have been created, collected and distributed for the purpose of research into literary and linguistic topics at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

, England. The OTA was founded by

Lou Burnard Lou Burnard (born 1946 in Birmingham, England) is an internationally recognised expert in digital humanities, particularly in the area of text encoding and digital libraries. He was assistant director of Oxford University Computing Services (OUC ...

and

Susan Hockey Susan is a feminine given name, from Persian "Susan" (lily flower), from Egyptian '' sšn'' and Coptic ''shoshen'' meaning "lotus flower", from Hebrew ''Shoshana'' meaning "lily" (in modern Hebrew this also means "rose" and a flower in general), ...

of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in 1976, initially as the Oxford Archive of Electronic Literature. It is thought to be one of the first archives of digital academic textual resources to collect and distribute materials from other research centres. The OTA continued to be hosted by OUCS (which became subsumed into IT Services in 2012), and in November 2016, the OTA collections found a new home in the

Bodleian Library The Bodleian Library () is the main research library of the University of Oxford, and is one of the oldest libraries in Europe. It derives its name from its founder, Sir Thomas Bodley. With over 13 million printed items, it is the sec ...

. In November 2021, the Bodleian Libraries posted an announcement stating that further deposits were no longer being accepted until further notice. From 2022, the OTA collections have been available from th
Literary and Linguistic Data Service
repository, which continues to develop the collections with new acquisitions, and is part of the national and European research infrastructure, as a CLARIN centre and a trusted repository in the AHRC-funded ''Infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities Programme''. The OTA collection consists of deposits of primary-source academic electronic editions and linguistic corpora created by the academic community. The OTA was one of founding centres in the European research infrastructure ( CLARIN, the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). The OTA collection contains many scholarly documents marked up according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, including copies of all of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and

Early English Books Online The Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is a not-for-profit organization based in the library of the University of Michigan . Its purpose is to produce large-scale full-text electronic resources (especially in the humanities) on behalf of both member ...

(EEBO) texts which are now in the public domain, linked data. The OTA also manages the distribution of the British National Corpus (BNC). From 1996 to 2008, the OTA was one of the centres of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, and hosted AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics, a national centre for the support of digital research in literary and linguistic subject areas in the UK.

References

External links

Oxford Text Archive collections at the Literary and Linguistic Data Service repository at the University of Oxford

Oxford Text Archive website at the Bodleian Libraries
{{authority control Organizations established in 1976 1976 establishments in England Text Archive Text Archive Archives in Oxfordshire British literature websites Discipline-oriented digital libraries Text Encoding Initiative Digital Humanities Centers Bodleian Library