Indiana Authors and Their Books

Indiana Authors and Their Books is an LSTA–funded project based on the digitization and encoding of the 3–volume reference work, Indiana Authors and Their Books, published by Wabash College in 1949, 1974, and 1981. The encyclopedia covers nearly two hundred years of Indiana's literary history (1816–1980), and contains approximately 7,000 author entries. Each of the author entries, in turn, contains a bibliography collectively referencing close to 21,000 citations.

Of the 21,000 titles referenced in Indiana Authors and Their Books, approximately 150 monographs were identified as representative of Indiana's Golden Age of Literature (1880–1920). Since its original conception, the project grew in scope as a test–bed for "productionizing" electronic text workflows in partnership with the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries Technical Services department. As a result, another 250 monographs published before 1923 were selected for electronic conversion. Although only a small yet distinguished subset of monographs listed in the encyclopedia and currently in the public domain have been digitized as part of this project, the remaining titles can be searched via external services like Google Books, WorldCat, HathiTrust Digital Library, and Indiana University's local catalog, IUCAT.

Encoded according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines, TEI P4, the texts represent literature by many famous Hoosier authors from Indiana's Golden Age, including Theodore Dreiser, Gene Stratton Porter, James Whitcomb Riley, and Booth Tarkington. Additionally, the collection includes political, educational, religious, and historical writing from many other Indiana authors.