The Oxford Text Archive will continue to store and preserve tens of thousands of digital texts, dictionaries, and language corpora for UK researchers, as it has done for almost fifty years. This matters because digital research outputs—from digitised historical manuscripts to recordings of minority languages—are fragile. Without a trusted, specialist repository, these resources can be lost, become inaccessible, or remain undiscoverable. The archive already holds a large collection of objects and will add new items each year, including outputs from AHRC-funded projects. It also connects UK researchers to European and international networks through the CLARIN infrastructure, enabling cross-border discovery and collaboration. If this work succeeds, the UK’s literary and linguistic research community will have a stable, long-term home for its digital data. Researchers working on lesser-resourced languages—such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, sign languages, and regional varieties of English—will benefit from targeted support. The project will also identify gaps in current provision, helping to ensure that no language or dialect is left out of the digital record. This is infrastructure that quietly underpins scholarship, teaching, and cultural preservation.
View original technical description
Trusted and secure specialist repositories provide a vital service for the dissemination, discovery, sharing, re-use and long-term preservation of the digital outputs of research projects in literary and linguistic disciplines. Working alongside specialist repositories in other disciplines, and institutional and open access repositories, the Oxford Text Archive will continue to provide specialist curation for texts, corpora, lexical resources, databases and other complex digital objects and collections, and connect them to domain-specific resource discovery services and tools for their analysis, as it has done for almost fifty years. The investment in a national repository achieves improved value-for-money from the larger investments in research projects and lowers barriers and costs for new and ongoing projects making use of the digital data. The project will ensure the ongoing sustainability of the more than seventy thousand objects already in the archive, as well as providing a home for a minimum of 25 new items each year, including all eligible and relevant outputs of AHRC-funded projects. The repository service supports researchers across the UK and is a vital hub in the national digital curation service provided by the Infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities (iDAH) programme. As part of the CLARIN European Research Infrastructure Consortium, the repository offers a vital link to Europe-wide (and wider international) networks, taking advantage of emerging best practice and new technologies, enabling resources to be discovered and used across borders, and supporting new and ongoing international collaborations. In this phase of the development of the service there will be a focus on support for the regions and for lesser-resourced languages such as Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, regional varieties of English, sign languages, other minority and community languages, and historical varieties of all of the above. Information about available resources will be gathered and disseminated, and gaps in the provision will be identified.
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know