EEBO, Microfilm, and Umberto Eco: Historical Lessons and Future Directions for Building Electronic Collections

Abstract

In an age of mass digitization with book scanning projects like Google and Microsoft and their open access rival, the Open Archives Initiative, it is easy to forget that this is not the first time such efforts to the world's information and make it universally accessible and have been attempted. In 1926, A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave compiled A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640 which at that time was the most comprehensive bibliography of English printed material in the early modern period. That project later developed into Early English Books (EEB), a microfilm project started by University Microfilms International (UMI), and an electronic database Early English Books Online (EEBO) produced by ProQuest Information and Learning. Comments Reprinted from Microform and Imaging Review, Volume 36, Issue 4, Fall 2007, pages 159-164. At the time of publication, the author, Shawn Martin, was affiliated with the University of Michigan. Currently, he is the Scholarly Communication Librarian at Penn Libraries of the University of Pennsylvania. This journal article is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/library_papers/66 Shawn Martin (shawnmar@ umichedu) is Project Librarian for the Text Creation Partnership at the University of Michigan. In an age of mass digitization with book scanning projects like Google and Microsoft and their open access rival, the Open Archives Initiative, it is easy to forget that this is not the first time such efforts to the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful1 have been attempted. In 1926, A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave compiled A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640 which at that time was the most comprehensive bibliography of English printed material in the early modern period. That project later developed into Early English Books (EEB), a microfilm project started by University Microfilms International (UMI), and an electronic database Early English Books Online (EEBO) produced by ProQuest Information and Learning. Though current mass digitization projects may hail themselves as the first attempt to organize large amounts of information and make them available, they are not. Certainly they are the first to do so at such a large scale. However, there are lessons that can be drawn from earlier attempts to do the same thing. One could try to do a complete history of information gathering from the time of ancient Egypt. Yet a more useful comparison might be the age of microform. Many of the same arguments about preservation, greater access, and easier search capability are similar to the arguments about mass microfilming only 50 years ago. What is or is not unique about digitization as opposed to microfilm, and, more importantly, what lessons from mass microfilming can be learned for modern electronic projects? By looking at the history of just one of these mass microfilm/digitization projects, Early English Books Online, it may become possible to discover some of the answers to those questions. As early as 1884, efforts had been made to effectively cata-