ANN ARBOR—The original 1775 Massachusetts proclamation for a public thanksgiving and President George Washington’s resignation speech to United States citizens are at your fingertips.

The University of Michigan, NewsBank/Readex Co. and the American Antiquarian Society have formed the Text Creation Partnership, an important source for the study of 17th and 18th century America to students and scholars through digital page images, searchable Optical Character Recognition and edited textual transcriptions.

The collection, called the Charles Evans’ American Bibliography, covers the years 1639 to 1800 and contains nearly 40,000 early American Imprints. It is noted as the definitive resource for studies of such topics as slavery, politics, religion and witchcraft, as well as texts relating to important events during the American Revolution.

Most of these original materials are held at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass., said Shawn Martin, the project’s outreach librarian and an assistant librarian at U-M’s University Library. Others are held by partner libraries, of which there are currently more than 50.

Partner institutions support the Text Creation Partnership financially and can contribute subject or technical expertise while maintaining a link to faculty and student users to create a sense of community around the initiative. Among the current partners in the Evans project are large research institutions such as Dartmouth, Princeton, Stanford and Yale as well as liberal arts colleges like Reed and Gettysburg and even international institutions like the University of Hong Kong.

The Evans-TCP project is working to create 6,000 transcribed textual editions from the 40,000 titles contained in the Evans Digital Database published by Readex. Currently, more than one thousand of these editions are available to partner institutions with U-M adding about 150 titles bi-monthly.

Click for more information about this project or to browse the holdingsU-M’s TCP site: