Amidst the doom and gloom (aplenty here in the northwoods), here's great news from the Bodleian Library, in cooperation with the University of Michigan (credit where credit is due)!
Click that link and you're taken to an article about how the Bodleian and U of Michigan are making early texts available to the public for free!
From my short exploration, it looks like you can get full access to keyboarded and coded editions (is there a better term?) of the texts in modern fonts. So, texts that haven't been keyboarded, you can't see more than the bibliographic information.
So, if what you're after is the "content" coded in the words, this is fantastic! It's way easier for most of us to read modern fonts than, say, black letter fonts. That's especially true when the digital versions are hard to read.
Here's a link to the actual resource hosted at the U of Michigan. I was able to search right off the bat, and then encouraged to make a guest account to have full access. I made a guest account (email address and password), and was able to look at a text that was keyboarded, but not one that wasn't keyboarded.
So, basically, this has a lot of the good parts of EEBO without the expense. You don't get to see digitized images, but for most uses, this is exactly what people need most!
I say, hurray for the Bodleian and the U of Michigan! This is a boon to book lovers! Thank you!
Transcription?
ReplyDeleteAnd I believe credit goes to the TCP (in conjunction with EEBO) as fully as to the institutional sponsors--so much of my recent work would have been impossible without the heroic labor of the TCP.