EEBO Interactions’ Web 2.0 Technology Creates a Collaborative Community Among Researchers and Scholars

“EEBO has long been a vehicle for ProQuest’s technology leadership – from the pioneering use of microfilm in the 1930s to digitization that took the collection to the Web and opened access to researchers around the world,” said Dan Burnstone, vice-president of ProQuest’s Arts & Humanities publishing. “Those technological feats helped build a community of researchers, scholars, librarians, students and teachers for whom EEBO is a central resource in their work. Now, we’re innovating with technology again, taking that sense of community to an entirely new level, making it simple for members of this geographically diverse community to collaborate and learn from one another.”

EEBO Interaction’s Web 2.0 technology offers scholars more direct and more immediate ways of disseminating and responding to new knowledge. The network’s registered users can share commentary, queries, contextual material and links relating to works and authors represented in EEBO, and edit and expand upon existing submissions by other contributors. EEBO Interactions also provides an avenue for researchers to contribute to the database itself by allowing corrections and improvements to existing attribution and dating information.

By creating a forum for engaging with users of EEBO around the world, the site is expected to sponsor debate, highlight new scholarship, and serve as a vehicle for teaching and research Q&A, made easy through the site’s support of direct messaging.

While the EEBO Interactions site is freely accessible on the web, the ability to interact with the resource – to add, edit and/or delete submissions – is restricted to its registered users, ensuring the content they share is trustworthy and valuable. Registration is open to authenticated EEBO users and to other scholars who complete the site’s Registration Request form.

EEBO Interactions will be moderated by a team of independent editors and ProQuest is currently accepting inquiries for new moderators through the EEBO Webmaster (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/about/webmaster.htm) or directly through Peter White (peter.white@proquest.co.uk) or Jo-Anne Hogan (jo-anne.hogan@proquest.com).

EEBO Interactions is part of ProQuest’s larger initiative to leverage social networking to advance serious research. AtmosPeer, an online community for atmospheric scientists developed in collaboration with the American Meteorological Society, the Atmospheric Science Librarians International (ASLI) and The Conference Exchange, was launched in January.

To learn more about EEBO Interactions or create an account, visit http://eebo-interactions.chadwyck.com.

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