From The English Poetry Full-Text Database to seven flavours of Literature Online: ten years of digital publishing in the humanities at Chadwyck-Healey, 1991-2001, and a look into the next ten.

Abstract

Chadwyck-Healey have been at the forefront in creating electronic research and teaching tools for humanities academics, scholars and students around the world for over 10 years. Not surprising during that time research and teaching requirements, the legal environment, technology and user expectations have changed dramatically. Through sharing our experience of creating and publishing digital resources I will explore how many of the key issues influencing the creation and publishing of these resources have evolved during that time and take a look at the what the future may hold. I will specifically explore the issues and decisions that were taken in project/collection selection, rights acquisition, digital content creation, aggregation & integration of content, delivery platforms, customer expectations & usage and commercial models from both an editorial and commercial perspective. The presentation will draw heavily on comparisons between a 1992 landmark Chadwyck-Healey project English Poetry on CD-Rom and our new British History Online, publishing in June 2001.