3.3 Freely accessible resources
3.3.1 The Oxford Text Archive
3.3.2 Project Gutenberg
3.3.3 Many Books
The University of Oxford Text Archive (OTA) is a digital collection of thousands of literary texts in more than 25 different languages which are all freely available. It offers a catalogue that can be browsed as well as a search function. The latter is, however, merely a customised Google search and therefore of little interest for linguists. The webpage for each listed text, as for example the one for Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, contains additional information on the work and offers the possibility to download it in a plain text version or in other formats. Strangely enough, a click on the suggested keywords (LC keywords), e.g. on Plays -- England -- 17th century did not work in a test. However, if you just search for Plays, England, 17th and click on repeat the search with the omitted results included at the bottom of the result page, the search engine gives you a list of 114 results that fulfill the wanted criteria. Unfortunately, the titles of the links are cryptic and do not allow any association with the texts they refer to.
Project Gutenberg offers over 40,000 freely available literary texts which can be downloaded in various formats including epub, mobi and plain text. The webpage of the individual work, as the one for Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, offers the birth-and-death dates of the author and some keywords like tragicomedy. As is the case with the OTA, the searching possibilities are very limited. However, in contrast to the OTA, it does allow the user to search, for example, for English dramas of the 17th century by typing the keywords into the search box, separated by a comma.
Among the three freely accessible online resources for literary texts, Many Books is the one arranged most clearly. It offers more than 29,000 eBooks which can be downloaded in more formats than on either Project Gutenberg or the OTA. The pages of individual texts, as the one for Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, do not give any additional information about the author or edition, but name the year of publication, the genre and the word count. Furthermore, by means of the advanced search, a query within the Many Books archive is the most comfortable one. Thus it even allows users to search within a particular time span. However, and this is true for all freely accessible resources, the compilation of a database by downloading titles and transferring them into files that can easily be accessed with a linguistic concordancer would be an extremely arduous task. A partial automation by use of a programming language, as Schlüter mentions in section 3.3 of her chapter with respect to the historical literature databases, would presuppose considerable programming skills on the part of the user.
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