The Earlham School of Religion's DQC (Digital Quaker Collection) at http://esr.earlham.edu/dqc/.

Collection

The collection onsists of over 500 individual Quaker written works from the 17th and 18th centuries, selected from the Friends Collection of Lilly Library of Earlham. Collection consists of full text and page images of the works.

Selection Decisions

The primary selection goal is explicitly stated on the About the Project page: "The collection is intended to cover several centuries of Quaker literature, all considered to be in the public domain. It represents works written from a variety of perspectives. The collection include works written by men and women. The geographic range takes in England, Ireland, and America. One can find in this collection journals, histories, doctrinal works, letters, sermons, pamphlets, and proceedings." A good number of the texts are available elsewhere in digital format, but a secondary, but still major goal of selection, was to facilitate research and analysis by using a powerful search function and having a high degree of granularity in the collection's works.

Metadata

Metadata is attached to individual files using XML and TEI Guidelines.

Information attached to most or all objects includes author, author's gender, place of publication, date of publication, related digital or image view of a page, page or image number in the collection, the section of the work that the page resides in, and where the section starts. Metadata attached to the work includes the number of pages in the work.
The collection can be browsed by author or title.
The entire digital text collection can be searched using a full-text search and additional filter possibilities are author, gender, place of publication, and date of publication. Search results are ranked and, if the search results in a large list, the list is broken into short, easily readable pages. (The search term is highlighted in red in the text of the resulting documents.) A search history is easily available for each session. Once a document is opened from the search list, a Hit List view is available, which gives the number of occurences of the search term within the document.
There is no function for viewing related items to the work other than viewing the search history or exploring the current search list. There is no audio version for any of the files, but users with vision difficulties can easily enlarge the images and text or use a reader for the digital text.

Object Characteristics

Some pages are available as digital text, most as both digital text or image,and either can viewed with the click of a button.
The images are scanned in at 400 dpi, the quality of the images are good, and the digital text versions are very accurate.
Page images can be enlarged or reduced in size with the click of the appropriate button.
The software used in the digitization project include both proprietary and open source, but overall, access and search of the collection is by the Earlham School of Religion's proprietary technology, so the individual documents don't show up in the result lists of external search engines such as Google. This impedes a stated goal of the collection, "The Digital Quaker Collection project supports the school’s role as an educator of students at a distance and as a resource for Quaker research to persons around the world." The findability of individual documents in this collection is nonexistent, so unless you do an external search that lists the collection itself or ESR, it's difficult to stumble upon the collection.

Intended Audience

The intended audience includes not only the students and scholars at the school, but also local Quaker congregations and anyone else who would like to study the texts from a distance. The latter includes students in ERS's distance education program, ESR Access.