*To access the collections, please go to the [AHDS Central Repository] , or the Oxford Text Archive's [online catalogue] *

By Alan Morrison, Collections Manager

AHDS Literature, Languages and Literature is hosted by the Oxford Text Archive (OTA), based at Oxford University Computing Services. The OTA has a long history of serving the needs of the academic community and much of its current collection pre-dates the creation of the AHDS. Established in 1976, the OTA was one of only a few repositories in the world to offer a dual service of free archival storage space and distribution for digital resources, many of which would have disappeared without the intervention of the OTA. The OTA was set up in order to prevent the costly duplication of effort in the digital arena, as well as promoting best practice in electronic text creation and encoding. The original collections policy was all encompassing, taking texts from all over the World, in any format or language, within the broad subject area of the Humanities. This open accessions policy has resulted in a wide range of textual material, in a variety of encoding formats, comprising of ancient and classical texts, modern classic authors, drama and poetry, as well as a large collection of reference and linguistic materials.

In many ways these original principals have been carried on and formalized by the inclusion of the OTA within the AHDS. While the OTA still accepts deposits from all over the world, it has focused its attention on collecting and preserving the digital output of academic projects within the UK Higher Education sector. Inclusion in the AHDS has provided the OTA with a greater visibility within the digital resources community in the UK, and given it a platform to better shape the working practices of that community.

While the OTA has always supported the linguistics community, in terms of providing resources, it was not until additional funding from the AHDS that it was able to employ a full-time Linguistics Officer to exclusively focus on this community and its needs. As a result, many of the recent deposits with the OTA have been language resources deposited by lingusitics researchers. The most requested resource in the OTA collection is the Toronto dictionary of Old English Corpus, comprising all existing Old English documents. This outstanding resource, originally deposited in 1985, has been complemented by the deposit of numerous new linguistic corpora.

The increased interest in linguistic resources does not detract from the core activities of the AHDS, which is to collect, distribute, and preserve high quality digital resources within the UK. AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics continues to promote best practice in the creation of textual resources, specifically advocating the use of open source, non-proprietary software and encoding schemes (such as the Text Encoding Initiative). Resources created as a result of grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Board are of particular importance to the AHDS, but the continued flexible collections policy means that no digital resource created within the UK should be without a safe archival home.

To see what resources have recently been deposited with the OTA, please consult [our list of new accessions] . To access the full catalogue of resources, please go to [our catalogue] .

To find out more about the AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics see the ['About Us' pages] .

AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics is part of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).
Copyright AHDS Literature, Lagnuages and Linguistics, University of Oxford, 2007.