ANN ARBOR, Mich., April 16, 2007 - ProQuest CSA and the Early English Books Online (EEBO) Text Creation Partnership announce the call for entries for the 2007 EEBO in Undergraduate Studies Essay Competition. The competition grants five prizes with cash awards totaling more than $2,500. The deadline for submitting essays is October 31, 2007. Winners will be announced in January 2008.

The EEBO in Undergraduate Studies Essay Competition honors undergraduate research papers that rely on research conducted via the Early English Books Online collection of primary texts. Essays may reflect the research in diverse academic disciplines - history, literary studies, philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, and more - or they may be interdisciplinary in nature. The chief requirement is that each paper draws substantial evidence from the works included in EEBO.

Entries are evaluated by a committee of librarians and scholars from around the world representing various disciplines and areas of study.  The committee reads and evaluates each submitted essay for quality and creativity of the thesis, potential for the essay to contribute to its field and to early modern studies more generally, and significance of the study for illustrating EEBO's usefulness in undergraduate research. 

Winning essays in the 2006 EEBO in Undergraduate Studies Essay Competition are outstanding examples of these criteria.  "The papers submitted all offered impressive evidence of the exciting uses students can find for primary texts," said Shawn Martin, EEBO-TCP Project Outreach Librarian, The University of Michigan, "and in many cases they also illustrate the noteworthy contributions that undergraduates can make to the field of early modern studies.  We are very glad to have had a role in the work these winners have accomplished, and we are very proud of the scholarship these students have exhibited in their use of texts from EEBO."
2006 EEBO in Undergraduate Studies Essay Competition Winners:

• " Grand Prize: Mark Hanin (Yale University) - A Revolution of Political Allegiance:  Elkanah Settle and Henry Care
• " First Prize: Danielle Bradley (University of Iowa) - From Fact to Fable:  The Book of John Mandeville's 16th Century Fall from Authority
• " Second Prize: Caroline Murray (Bath-Spa University) - The Lord Mayor's Show in Print, 1616-1698
• " Honorable Mention: Victoria Mason (University of Warwick) - "Unknown but reall:" A Pseudonymous response to Charles II's Coronation
• " Honorable Mention: Niina Pollari (Florida Atlantic University) - Repetition, Echo, Sound:  The Connection Between John Milton's "Paradise Lost" and Helkiah Crooke's Descriptions of the Ear in "Mikrokosmographia"

For further details on the essay contest, along with prior-year recipients, visit:  http://www.lib.umich.edu/tcp/eebo/edu/edu_essay.html.

About Early English Books Online
EEBO contains page images of 125,000 books listed in the Pollard and Redgrave, Wing, and Thomason Tracts catalogs. With its substantial coverage of printed material found in England between 1473 and 1700, EEBO provides rich research possibilities for students interested in a wide variety of topics in early modern studies. Students access the collection via the Internet at libraries and institutions subscribing to EEBO.

About Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership
The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) is currently undertaking the task of converting 25,000 works found in EEBO into searchable text. While the University of Michigan University Library, Oxford University, and ProQuest Information and Learning initiated the EEBO-TCP, more than 150 libraries are currently instrumental in making this project possible. The partnership is creating accurate SGML text files and linking them to EEBO page images, thereby allowing users to perform keyword searches as well as see features of the original work. The library partners in the conversion project also act as co-owners of the encoded text files, enjoying full rights of access, adaptation, and distribution.

 

About ProQuest
ProQuest creates specialized information resources and technologies that propel successful research, discovery, and lifelong learning. A global leader in serving libraries of all types, ProQuest offers the expertise of such respected brands as Chadwyck-Healey™, UMI®, SIRS®, and eLibrary®. With Serials Solutions®, Ulrich's™, RefWorks®, COS™, Dialog® and now Bowker® part of the ProQuest brand family, the company supports the breadth of the information community with innovative discovery solutions that power the business of books and the best in research experience.

More than a content provider or aggregator, ProQuest is an information partner, creating indispensable research solutions that connect people and information. Through innovative, user-centered discovery technology, ProQuest offers billions of pages of global content that includes historical newspapers, dissertations, and uniquely relevant resources for researchers of any age and sophistication—including content not likely to be digitized by others. Inspired by its customers and their end users, ProQuest is working toward a future that blends information accessibility with community to further enhance learning and encourage lifelong enrichment.

For more information, visit www.proquest.com or the ProQuest parent company website, www.cig.com.