ƐPSILON is both a research consortium and a developing, flexible, technical infrastructure for recreating the network of practitioners who expanded scientific knowledge in the long nineteenth century. It promotes and supports the digital creation, delivery, and preservation of scientific correspondence. Designed to link letter-texts from multiple sources for cross-searching and analysis, Epsilon opens up c19th science letters to the next generation of researchers and to the widest possible public audience.
Its founding partners are:
- La Correspondance d'Ampère
- The Darwin Correspondence Project
- The John Stevens Henslow Project
- Calendar of the Correspondence of Sir John Herschel Database at the Adler Planetarium
- The Joseph Dalton Hooker Correspondence Project at Kew
- The Correspondence of Michael Faraday
- Ferdinand von Mueller Correspondence
- The Correspondence of John Tyndall
Together with Cambridge Digital Library,The Royal Institution, and The Royal Society of London
A beta version of the site was demonstrated at the History of Science Society meeting in Toronto in November 2017. The first public version (epsilon.ac.uk) launched at the joint meeting of the British and European History of Science Societies in September 2018 (speakers and abstracts for the conference session are here).
ƐPSILON is designed to:
- Maintain the independent identity of ongoing projects
- Recognise the right of the originator to be identified
- Accept material in multiple formats
- Offer different levels of controlled access
And to take texts, metadata, and images from:
- Completed and ongoing born-digital projects
- Orphaned digital projects
- Print only projects, completed, in progress, in and out of copyright
- Print and digital projects in various formats
- Ebook publications
- Individual digital transcriptions of letters created by scholars
- Crowd-sourced transcription from digitised images
How? We map letter data to TEI P5 XML encoding using the <correspDesc> metadata exchange element set. Advice on conversion and on using XML as an editing format is available. Search is powered by XTF, an open source tool.
ƐPSILON Rights Notice and Takedown policy
We are most grateful to the editors and publishers of the various collections represented on the Epsilon site (epsilon.ac.uk) for making metadata and letter texts available. Those editions in turn would not be possible without the generous support of many copyright holders. While the contributors of content to Epsilon are responsible for ensuring compliance with legislation, if you are a rights holder and are concerned that you have found material on the Epsilon website for which you have not given permission or which is not covered by a legal exception or exemption, in addition to contacting the contributor, please also contact us stating the following:
- Your contact details
- The full bibliographical details of the material
- The exact and full URL where you found the material
- A statement and any proof you may provide that you are the rights holder or are an authorised representative thereof.
Upon receipt of notification, the Epsilon team will acknowledge receipt of your complaint by email or letter and will make an initial assessment of the validity of the complaint. Upon receipt of a valid complaint the material will be removed from the Epsilon website pending an agreed solution.
Contact us at:
Epsilon, c/o Darwin Correspondence Project University Library West Road Cambridge CB3 9DR UKEmail, with the subject line 'Epsilon rights' and providing the details as above, may be sent to epsilon@lib.cam.ac.uk.