Developing a network to investigate the development of a global dataset of digitised texts

在世界各地，图书馆、档案馆、大学和许多其他组织都在对馆藏进行数字化，以便免费提供给研究和学术界。虽然这一努力使数百万文本可用，但大部分努力是不协调的，使得研究人员或数字学者很难充分利用这一不断增长的语料库。此外，希望有效开展数字化工作的组织无法轻松检查文本是否已经数字化，这些问题可以通过开发一个包含数字化文本数据集的国际登记簿来解决，该数据集汇集了所有公开来源的链接。这样一个数据集的存在将带来三大好处：寻求大型文本语料库的学者可以轻松搜索和编辑来自许多来源的项目的链接，创建新的集合，他们可以通过数字方法进行研究。希望找到数字化文本的读者将能够快速有效地搜索所有潜在的来源，以轻松找到文本是否已经数字化，并获得在线文本;进行数字化计划的图书馆将能够发现已经数字化的文本，通过避免重复使自己的数字化计划更加有效。它还能为研究和其他目的进行大规模的收集分析。该项目建议在HathiTrust（美国现有的值得信赖的数字化文本聚合器、保存代理和访问平台）与英国主要研究图书馆（数字化材料的大规模来源）之间开展新的合作。将创建一个试验性的综合数据集来全面测试这一想法，并将探索可持续性的选择，以便为合作提供一个持续的运营模式。以前的项目试图提供数字化文本的登记，但这个网络将在两个方面超越这些努力。首先，它将进行研究，以确定我们提出的数据集如何支持数字化文本的发现。其次，它将创建一个超越现有项目的数据集，通过提供来自世界上几个最大的数字化组织的图书馆馆藏元数据的大规模数据集：虽然现有的努力集中在聚合和发现，但该项目将提供一个更全面的数据集，也适合研究人员和图书馆进行数据分析。这将支持地方、国家和全球数字化战略的发展。如果成功，这种模式有可能改变世界各地公民和研究人员对数字文本的访问，用于单一文本的研究，或用于数字学术的新语料库的整理。

All around the world, libraries, archives, universities, and many other organisations are digitising collections in order to make them freely available for research and scholarship. Whilst this endeavour is making millions of texts available, much of the effort is uncoordinated, making it hard for researchers or digital scholars to make the best use of this growing corpus. In addition, organisations wishing to target their digitisation efforts efficiently are unable to easily check to see if a text has already been digitised.These problems could be overcome by the development of an international register that contains a dataset of digitised texts, which brings together links to all openly available sources. The existence of such a dataset would deliver three big benefits:Scholars seeking large corpora of texts could easy search and compile links to items across from many sources, creating novel collections from which they can undertake research with digital methods. Readers wishing to find a digitised text, would be able to search quickly and efficiently across all potential sources to easily find whether a text has been digitised, and to gain access to the online text;Libraries undertaking digitisation programmes would be able to discover already digitised texts, making their own digitisation programmes more efficient by avoiding duplication. It would also enable large-scale collection analysis for research and other purposes. This project proposes the development of a new collaboration between the HathiTrust who are an existing and trusted aggregator of digitised texts, a preservation agent, and an access platform in the US, and key UK research Libraries who are large-scale sources of digitised materials. A trial combined dataset will be created to fully test the idea, and sustainability options will be explored in order to provide the collaboration with an ongoing operational model.Previous projects have sought to provide registers of digitised texts, but this network will go beyond those efforts in two ways. First, it will undertake research to identify how our proposed dataset could support discovery of digitised texts. Second, it will create a dataset that goes beyond existing projects by providing a large-scale dataset of library collection metadata from several of the largest digitising organisations in the world: whereas existing efforts are focused on aggregation and discovery, this project will provide a more comprehensive dataset that is also suitable for researchers and libraries to undertake data analysis. This will support the development of local, national and global digitisation strategies. If successful, this model has the potential to transform access to digital texts for citizens and researchers worldwide, for the study of single texts, or for the collation of novel corpora for digital scholarship.