Developing Effetive Resources for Research on Texts: Collecting Texts, Tagging Texts, Cataloguing Texts, Using Texts, and Putting Texts in Context

Although, the value of corpus-based research has been recognized since the compilation of the Brown and LOB corpora in the 1960s, the overall picture today is still one of access to texts provided in many different ways, some of which are ad hoc</it> and dependent on individuals. Attention has thus turned to the need for reusable corpora and the establishment of procedures to guarantee that reusability. In the longer term we see the library as the place that will manitain and provide access to electronic texts and corpora, as it already does for print and other archival media. The Text Encoding Initiative's guidelines will play an important role in standardizing corpus-access procedures, in particular the TEL's proposal for an electronic text file header which will ensure that adequate information is available about the text and will provide the link with the library catalogue. We see a further need for detailed studies of the ‘uses and users’ of electronic texts and for research to establish a sounder methodology for the compilation of corpora.