From the Archives...

The Oxford Archive of English Literature was conceived in 1976. The original objective of the Archive was the collection of machine-readable texts which risked being discarded by scholars and securely preserving them, possibly making them available for use by others. This was the 'dustbin policy of archiving' with a concern for standards even then,

'no standard coding is currently envisaged [for the texts], as requirements vary considerably between texts, but some conversions may be carried out where possible. For example, where possible and requested, conversion of single-case (with shift characters) to upper and lower case will be carried out.'

Twenty years later the Oxford Text Archive stands as the best known text archive in the World. Encoding standards are of far greater significance, demonstrated by the conversion of texts to TEI-SGML. The Archive is now a service-provider to the Arts and Humanities Data Service , both reflecting and ensuring the continued collection, preservation, and dissemination of electronic texts for the future. Visit the Web site at http://info.ox.ac.uk/ota/

[Table of Contents] [Letter to the Editor]

Computers & Texts 12 (1996). Not to be republished in any form without the permission of CTI Textual Studies.

HTML Author: Michael Fraser (mike.fraser@oucs.ox.ac.uk)
Document Created: 22 August 1996
Document Modified:

The URL of this document is http://info.ox.ac.uk/ctitext/publish/comtxt/ct12/archive.html