The Text Creation Partnership creates standardized, accurate XML/SGML encoded electronic text editions of early print books. We transcribe and mark up the text from the millions of page images in ProQuest's Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage's Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex's Evans Early American Imprints. This work, and the resulting text files, are jointly funded and owned by more than 150 libraries worldwide. All of the TCP's work will be released the public domain for anyone to use.

The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), a learned society and research library founded in 1812, is the third oldest historical organization in the United States and the first to be national rather than regional in its purpose and the scope of its collections. It preserves the largest single collection of printed source material relating to the history, literature, and culture of the first 250 years of what is now the United States, and holds copies of nearly two-thirds of all books, pamphlets, and broadsides known to have been printed in this country between 1640 and 1821. In partnership with Readex (a division of NewsBank), AAS produced what has been called one of the most important microform collections ever, a reproduction of the contents of titles listed in the Evans bibliography of American imprints through 1800.

Readex and AAS have undertaken to digitize the entire Evans collection, which will include every item previously issued in microform, plus some 1,200 additional works located, catalogued, and digitized since completion of the earlier effort (a total of more than 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images). This resource also uses OCR technology to support searching the full text of the corpus.

The TCP sought to convert 6,000 of the most frequently studied books from the Evans bibliography. AAS, drawing on its already significant knowledge of these materials and its contacts with relevant specialists and scholars, selected the titles to be converted by the TCP, providing the text collection with the best possible core of significant titles. With the support of more than 90 institutions, Evans-TCP keyed and encoded 4,977 early American texts, which are available online to Evans-TCP partners. The Evans-TCP texts will be made available to the public June 30, 2014.