Oxford Text Archive

Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is an archive of electronic texts and other literary and language resources which have been created, collected and distributed for the purpose of research into literary and linguistic topics at the University of Oxford, England.

The OTA was founded by Lou Burnard and Susan Hockey of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in 1976, initially as the Oxford Archive of Electronic Literature. It is thought to be one of the first archives of digital academic textual resources to collect and distribute materials from other research centres.[1] The OTA continued to be hosted by OUCS (which became subsumed into IT Services[2] in 2012), and in November 2016, the OTA found a new home in the Bodleian Library.[3]

The OTA accepts deposits of primary-source academic electronic editions and linguistic corpora, and is one of the key centres in the European research infrastructure (CLARIN, the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure[4]). The OTA hosts many scholarly documents marked up according to the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative,[5] including copies of all of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) and Early English Books Online (EEBO) texts which are now in the public domain, linked data. The OTA also manages the distribution of the British National Corpus (BNC).

From 1996 to 2008, the OTA was one of the centres of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, and hosted AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics, a national centre for the support of digital research in literary and linguistic subject areas in the UK.