Oxford Text Archive

The OTA was founded by Lou Burnard and Susan Hockey of Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) in 1976, initially as the Oxford Archive of Electronic Literature. It is thought to be one of the first archives of digital academic textual resources to collect and distribute materials from other research centres.^[3]

From 1996 to 2008, the OTA was one of the centres of the Arts and Humanities Data Service, and hosted AHDS Literature, Languages and Linguistics, a national centre for the support of digital research in literary and linguistic subject areas in the UK.

The OTA continued to be hosted by OUCS (which became subsumed into IT Services^[4] in 2012), and in November 2016, the OTA collections found a new home in the Bodleian Library.^[5] In November 2021, the Bodleian Libraries posted an announcement stating that further deposits were no longer being accepted until further notice. From 2022, the OTA collections have been available from the Literary and Linguistic Data Service repository,^[6] which continues to develop the collections with new acquisitions, and is part of the national and European research infrastructure, as a CLARIN centre and a trusted repository in the AHRC-funded Infrastructure for Digital Arts and Humanities Programme (iDAH). There are more than 70,000 items in the collections, as of March 2025.

• Oxford Text Archive collections at the Literary and Linguistic Data Service repository at the University of Oxford
• Oxford Text Archive website at the Bodleian Libraries archived on the Wayback Machine April 2024