Undergraduate research papers that rely on research conducted using the EEBO collection were eligible for entry in the competition. EEBO is a Web-based resource containing full-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. The goal of the contest was to encourage undergraduate students to explore and describe the value of the information that can be obtained through this resource. Students access the collection via the Internet at libraries and institutions subscribing to EEBO. The competition was co-sponsored by ProQuest and the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership.

The competition committee named five winners:

Grand Prize: Stephanie Batkie (Northwestern University)

Second Prize: Susan Cavitch (Middle Tennessee State University)

Third Prize: Lisa Marie Ryling (Duke University)

Honorable Mention: Peter Eubanks (University of Virginia)

Honorable Mention: Xuchys Perez (University of Miami)

The Grand Prize-winning entry, Stephanie Batkie's “To Take an A ctive Role, Reading in Spenser’s Faerie Queene," calls upon meditative works found in EEBO to explore how the methods of interpretation that Spenser asked his readers to use overlapped with early modern schemes of religious reading. Calling on the works of authors ranging from St. Ignatious Loyola to George Puttenham, Batkie argues that Spenser's Faerie Queene shows concern with the responsibilities of both readers and writers as it guides its audience through the poem. "With access to the EEBO database," Batkie comments, "I was able to conduct my research on the meditative texts circulating in Elizabethan England, as well as writing about the nature of poetry, with an ease and flexibility that would not have been possible without such a resource."

Entries were judged by a committee of professionals and scholars from both information industry and academic contributors to Early English Books Online.

ProQuest Information and Learning and the Early English Books Online Text Creation partnership are sponsoring another essay competition for 2002. Details and guidelines of that competition appear in the attached Call for Entries.

For more information about the essay competition, email Hillary Nunn at hnunn@umich.edu.

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, over 50 libraries are currently instrumental in making this project possible. The partnership is devoting five years to the first phase of the conversion process, which will create SGML text files and link 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 the encoded text files, enjoying full rights of access, adaptation, and distribution.

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