Return to the Main FAQ MenuElectronic Text Centers are a new kind of resource in the world of academic resource sharing. The mission of most Electronic Text Centers is to build on-line collections of electronic texts, which are machine-readable versions of literary and historical documents or databases of linguistic or textual corpora, and to provide a place in an academic community in which people can access these texts. Because the range of available electronic texts is not as large as that of print metrials, most Electronic Text centers also provide facilities for the creation and analysis of electronic texts. There is also a need for education of the community because of the new technology and the new approaches to documents and the documentation of a text that Humanities Computing has developed over the past twenty years. However, Electronic Text Centers are not archives, Electronic Libraries, nor Humanities Computer Centers, though sometimes they are a part of or extension of all of these.
A key task for the staff of Electronic Text Centers is documentation and markup of the text collection (including markup of the electronic texts, which are often plain ASCII representations of the text with no indication of the edition they were taken from or markup of any kind). Some Electronic Text Centers catalogue their collection and make it available on the OPAC. Often training in how to use text preparation and analysis tools is also part of the E-Text Center's mission. Documentation of the text collections and software packages available at the center is often an ongoing duty, as is the construction and maintenance of a gopher and WWW page for user- friendly online access. Directors of Electronic Text Centers often have a graduate degree in some field of humanities research as well as in library and information science.
Here is a recently updated html version of the Directory of Electronic Text Centers.