Its purpose is to produce large-scale full-text electronic resources (especially in the humanities) on behalf of both member institutions (particularly academic libraries) and scholarly publishers, under an arrangement calculated to serve the needs of both, and in so doing to demonstrate the value of a business model that sees corporate and non-profit information-providers as potentially amicable collaborators rather than as antagonistic vendors and customers respectively.
The scans from which the texts were transcribed were themselves made from the microfilm copies made over the years by ProQuest and its antecedent companies, including the original University Microfilms, Inc.[2] EEBO-TCP Phase I concluded at the end of 2009, having transcribed about 25,300 titles, and immediately moved into EEBO-TCP Phase II (2009–), a sequel project dedicated to converting all the remaining unique English-language monographs (roughly 45,000 additional titles).
The Board is assisted in matters of selection and scholarship by an academic advisory group that includes faculty in the fields of early modern English and American studies.
DLPS is assisted by University of Oxford's Bodleian Digital Libraries Systems & Services (BDLSS), including the late Sebastian Rahtz.
[3] As of April 2011, the TCP had created about 40,000 searchable, navigable, full-text transcriptions of early books, a database of unmatched scope, scale, and utility to students in many fields.