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 of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in 1976, and is thought to be the oldest archive of digital academic textual resources. The OTA continues to be hosted by OUCS, with associated research and development projects ongoing in the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford.
The OTA accepts deposits of primary-source academic electronic editions and linguistic corpora, and is one of the key centres in the emerging European research infrastructure (CLARIN, the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure). The OTA hosts many scholarly documents marked up according to the latest (P5) edition of the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative, including copies of all of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) texts which are now in the public domain. 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.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“To a historian libraries are food, shelter, and even muse. They are of two kinds: the library of published material, books, pamphlets, periodicals, and the archive of unpublished papers and documents.”
—Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989)