Undergraduate research papers that rely on research conducted using the EEBO collection were eligible for entry in the competition. EEBO is a Web-based resource containing full-page images of 125,000 books listed in the Pollard and Redgrave, Wing, and Thomason Tracts catalogs. With its substantial coverage of printed material found in England between 1473 and 1700, EEBO provides rich research possibilities for students interested in a wide variety of topics in early modern studies. This year's contest included topics as wide-ranging as the aesthetics of horror in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama and 17th century advice manuals on how to have a healthy pregnancy.

The goal of the contest was to encourage undergraduate students to explore and describe the value of the information that can be obtained through this resource. Students access the collection via the Internet at libraries and institutions subscribing to EEBO. The competition was co-sponsored by ProQuest and the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership.

The competition committee named seven winners:

Grand Prize: Irina Dumitrescu (Trinity College, University of Toronto)

Second Prize: Polly Ha (Yale University)

Third Prize: Emily Raike (University of Pittsburgh)

Honorable Mention: Sheelagh Bevan (Columbia University)

Honorable Mention: Carolynn Dude (Lawrence University)

Honorable Mention: Tanya Pohl (Boston College)

Honorable Mention: Jaclyn Riches (Rutgers University)

The Grand Prize-winning entry, Irina Dumitrescu's "False Glitter: The Meaning of Gunpowder in Paradise Lost," explores the way that Milton takes advantage of existing associations of gunpowder with the devil to support ideas and characteristics of the epic poem. Dumitrescu shows the value of EEBO by using treatises on war to supply the context for works by authors such as Milton, Shakespeare and Ariosto as she compares their associations of gunpowder and cannon with Satan. Dumitrescu's paper "makes genuine use of the potential EEBO offers from research in obscure and difficult-to-access texts," according to one judge.

In her abstract, Dumitrescu writes: "The EEBO database and search facility allowed me to consult a variety of military treatises. The availability of these texts freed me from absolute dependence on the opinion of certain historians, and permitted me to engage with the rhetoric of the period firsthand. The result of using EEBO was that I could not only check secondary sources but find other sources of my own beyond."

Entries were judged through a blind review process by a committee of professionals and scholars drawn from both the information industry and from academic contributors to EEBO. Quality and creativity of the thesis, potential for the essay to contribute to the field and to early modern studies, and the significance for highlighting EEBO's usefulness in undergraduate research are among the criteria.

ProQuest Information and Learning and the Early English Books Online Text Creation partnership are sponsoring another essay competition for 2003. Details and guidelines of that competition appear on this web page:  www.lib.umich.edu/eebo/edu/edu_essay.html.

For more information about the essay competition, email Shawn Martin at shawnmar@umich.edu.

The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) is currently undertaking the task of converting 25,000 works found in EEBO into searchable text. While the Michigan University Library Oxford University and ProQuest Information and Learning initiated the EEBO-TCP, over 65 libraries are currently instrumental in making this project possible. The partnership is devoting five years to the first phase of the conversion process, which will create SGML text files and link them to EEBO page images, thereby allowing users to perform keyword searches as well as see features of the original work. The library partners in the conversion project also act as co-owners of the encoded text files, enjoying full rights of access, adaptation, and distribution. For more information, visit the EEBO-TCP project site at www.lib.umich.edu/eebo/.

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