TIP of the day: Tracking down the Source of Early American Imprints and storing in Favorites

MJ. Smith

Early American Imprints, 1639-1800 a.k.a. Library of Early American History (4,977 docs.) is one of Faithlife's minimally tagged, mass conversion products. This has several consequences:

• it provides us with direct access to some very interesting materials we are otherwise inapt to find
• it provides fertile ground for the use of community tags
• when used for scholarly purposes, it provides a starting point not the end reference/quote

1. Like the Perseus materials, the easiest way to screen for this collection (including the prepublication Library of Early English History (25,368 docs.) is by publisher -  publisher:Text or more accurately publisher:"Text Creation Partnership". Note: I would appreciate your prepub purchase of the British set ... I really want the psalters that are included.

2. A search in your browser on "Text Creation Partnership" will find their home page. On the right hand side it shows the source of their materials and below that direct access to their materials. You will see that they are a group that hand transcribes old published materials collected by other organizations and makes them freely available to the general public. Many of their sources are restricted to academic access. I have been unsuccessful in finding their transcription standards/conventions.

3. To store this URL in Logos, I open Tools --> Library --> Favorites

4. To add an appropriate folder, click on New Folder, change the name of the folder, and drag-and-drop to your preferred location. I have already set up a folder Logos/Verbum resource links, created a subfolder for Perseus and have created the Text Creation Partnership folder but not yet made if a subfolder parallel to Perseus.

5. To save the URL for TCP under the correct folder I simply drag-and-drop the icon beside the URL in the browser into my Logos Favorites. In IE/Edge this is a right click within the page, then drag-and-drop.

6. From the TCP home page, I can extract the source "Readex's Evans Early American Imprints" and trace back to their home page, if I so desire. This is the source of the TCP documents before transcription i.e. where you can view the actual document. Note it requires academic access.

7. Returning to the TCP home page, if I click on Evans-TCP Full text available to everyone under "Access to TCP texts), I get a page for accessing the same documents as I have in Logos. Save this URL under Favorites, and then select Browse.

8. I chose to browse by Title, Letter A, subgroup Ab, and selected "Abraham’s humble intercession for Sodom" as the document to view.

9. This is the view of the catalogue information from the TCP website:

10. This is view of the Title page of the actual document on TCP

11 This is the view of the same document, beginning at the title page, in Logos.

Here is an example of a transcription of a defective manuscript.

12. This is my Favorites with the relevant URL's to move more quickly to actual source document images, or the original TCP transcription/catalogue data in the future.

13. A sample document and its TCP coding i.e. the Fatihlife source document:

Note: Bradley has entered a case to allow us to label sermons and have them appear in the Sermon section of the Passage Guide. This will open another useful avenue for using this material.

Warning: Favorites is not a document. Therefore, if you accidentally delete something there is no document restore function.