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University of Michigan's historic William L. Clements Library

(MLive File Photo)

Thanks to a partnership between the University of Michigan Library, the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, and ProQuest, the texts of the first printed editions of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton as well as lesser-known titles from the early modern era are now accessible for free on the Web.

The U-M Library and the partnering agencies made public more than 25,000 manually transcribed texts from the first 200 years of the printed book (1473-1700), and an additional 40,000 texts are planned for release into the public domain by the end of the decade.

These books represent a significant portion of the estimated total output of English-language work published during the first two centuries of printing in England, and the release marks the completion of the first phase in the Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP).

"The open access release of the first group of EEBO-TCP texts marks an important milestone in an extraordinary international partnership between public and private entities," Charles Watkinson, U-M associate university librarian for publishing, said in a release.

"The opportunity now exists for scholars both within and outside the academy to apply powerful digital scholarship tools to a huge body of material that is of central importance to world culture. The University of Michigan Library is proud to continue to support this landmark project."

The EEBO-TCP texts were transcribed from ProQuest's Early English Books Online (EEBO), a subscriber database of facsimile images obtained from books in libraries all over the world, including the British Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Bodleian Library at Oxford.

Highlights of the catalogue include several of William Caxton's editions of the works of Chaucer, the first translations of Homer by the Elizabethan dramatist and classical scholar George Chapman, and Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica.

Officials at U-M said it's possibly of even greater value that thousands of less famous texts are also included. Among those books are gardening manuals, cookery books, ballads, auction catalogues, dance instructions and religious tracts detail the commonplace of the early modern period; books about witchcraft and sword fighting document its more exotic facets.

Many of these works have never before been available to the public online, and physical copies are rare and require special handling.

The transcribed texts, as open data, are freely available for anyone to read, reuse, reproduce, re-purpose and distribute through ProQuest's EEBO database.

Jeremy Allen is the University of Michigan reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Follow him on twitter at @JeremyAllenA2. Contact him at 810-247-4625 or jallen42@mlive.com. Find other University of Michigan-related stories here on MLive.com.