Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is an archive of

electronic text e-text (from "'' electronic text''"; sometimes written as etext) is a general term for any document that is read in digital form, and especially a document that is mainly text. For example, a computer-based book of art with minimal text, or a s ...

s 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 The University of Oxford is a collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the world's second-oldest university in contin ...

, England. The OTA was founded by Lou Burnard 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 The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a text-centric community of practice in the academic field of digital humanities, operating continuously since the 1980s. The community currently runs a mailing list, meetings and conference series, and main ...

, 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 i ...

(EEBO) texts which are now in the public domain, linked data. The OTA also manages the distribution of the

British National Corpus The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100-million-word text corpus of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources. The corpus covers British English of the late 20th century from a wide variety of genres, with the intention ...

(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