Institutional collaboration in the creation of digital linguistic resources: the case of the British Telecom correspondence corpus

In this chapter we discuss the creation of the British Telecom Correspondence Corpus (BTCC), a searchable database of letters taken from the public archives of British Telecom which were written by nearly four hundred authors on a wide variety of topics, between 1853 and 1982. In the first part of the chapter we discuss our experiences working on the Jisc-funded New Connections project, a collaboration between Coventry University, BT Heritage and The National Archives, focussing particularly on the methodological issues we encountered. The corpus was created to address a gap in existing corpus resources, and so that researchers (primarily linguists) could access and, crucially, engage with the language of the letters. Since the completion of the BTCC we have put together a funding bid to expand the corpus to include correspondence written to and from the Post Office, an institution with many historical links to BT. This chapter addresses issues surrounding institutional collaboration in both phases of this ongoing research