The Humanities Text Initiative at the University of Michigan
and the Oxford Text Archive at the University of Oxford
are very pleased to announce the opening of a North American mirror
site for the Oxford Text Archive.
 
From May 1st, the contents of the anonymous ftp area at
ftp://ota.ox.ac.uk/pub/ota/public
will be mirrored at
ftp://ftp.hti.umich.edu/pub/ota/public
and vice versa!
 
The Oxford Text Archive has long provided access to published and
unpublished electronic texts in English, Latin, Greek, and many other
languages.  Its current catalogue contains over 1300 texts, over 250 of
which are in the public domain and are freely available.  The number of
these texts is growing steadily, and will increase rapidly during 1996
as a result of the Archive's recent appointment as textual service
provider to the UK's Arts and Humanities Data Service. All public access
texts are made available in an SGML format following the recommendations
of the ACH-ALLC-ACL Text Encoding Initiative.
 
The North American mirror site will increase the speed of access for OTA
users in North America, and decrease the load on the Oxford site,
enhancing access for all users. It will also provide European users with
access to texts produced at the HTI with comparable improvements in
access.
 
Chris Powell
University of Michigan
Humanities Text Initiative