The Oxford Text Archive is a facility provided by Oxford University Computing Services. It has no connexion with Oxford University Press or any other commercial organisation and exists to serve the interests of the academic community by providing archival and dissemination facilities for electronic texts at low cost.
The Archive offers scholars long term storage and maintenance of their electronic texts free of charge. It manages non-commercial distribution of electronic texts and information about them on behalf of its depositors.
To see which texts are currently available for anonymous FTP, please browse our file server.
Because the texts come from so many different sources, they are held in many different formats. The texts also vary greatly in their accuracy and the features which have been encoded. Some have been proof read to a high standard, while others may have come straight from an optical scanner, Some have been extensively tagged with special purpose analytic codes, and others simply designed to mimic the appearance of the printed source. The Archive does not require texts to conform to any standard of formatting or accuracy.
All texts which are publicly available from the Archive's FTP server are first converted to a standard format. This format conforms to the recommendations of the International Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), using a simple SGML document type definition.
For a low-level introduction to the TEI, click here.
For a low-level introduction to SGML, click here.
Most of the texts can be used with commonly available text indexing and concordancing software, or can easily be converted for that purpose. All texts are held as `plain ASCII' files on magnetic tape, with no special formatting codes. Documentation of the coding scheme used in each text is supplied with it, wherever possible.
Information about SGML-aware software is readily available from the SGML Project at Exeter University. and other sites.
Many of the texts in the Archive are subject to some form of copyright restriction. The Archive's obligations to its depositors generally restrict use of the texts to private study and research. In some cases, depositors have also authorised use of the texts in teaching. In all cases, users of the texts must agree not to use the texts commercially and not to redistribute copies of them without consultation.
Users of restricted access texts, are requested to sign a standard User Declaration before copies can be made available to them.
If you are a registered user of Oxford University Computing Services (i.e. you have an account on OXFORD.VAX or black), just send an e-mail message to the username ARCHIVE (on either machine) specifying which texts you want to use and for what purpose.
If you are not a registered OUCS user, you can access only texts in categories P, U and A.
P category texts are in the public domain. No formality is needed for these texts. Many of them can be downloaded directly by anonymous FTP, from here. At present, we are making only TEI-conformant texts available in this way: there are many other places from which public domain texts can be obtained.
U and A texts are usually distributed on magnetic tape or cartridge, though smaller texts can be sent on diskette. You can also now download texts by ftp, though you still need to send us a signed agreement form.
Where copies are made on disk or tape, we make a small distribution charge to cover media and postage.
Each title in the list is preceded by a code made of of a single letter indicating the availability of the text (U, A, P, or X), in some cases followed by a star, a number identifying the text and another single letter which gives some idea of the size of the text.
Texts with availability code P may be downloaded directly, either from our anonymous FTP server at ota.ox.ac.uk or from other FTP servers on the InterNet. For more information on using FTP, please contact your local computing service.
For all other texts, you must complete and return an order form For texts with availability code U, the only authorisation needed is your signature on the Order Form. For A category texts, you must also provide written authorisation from the depositor of the text; you should therefore ask us for depositor details before ordering. All orders must be prepaid to the account of Oxford University Computing Service, in sterling or in US dollars. We cannot issue invoices, and any orders which are not prepaid or not submitted on the standard order form will be ignored.