One is to chart and study the medieval and early modern manuscripts and printed books of English provenance in the libraries and archives of St Petersburg. Valuable results have been obtained in this area and part of them have already reached publication. The second main aim is to encourage corpus-based historical study of English in St Petersburg by giving courses in the use of electronic corpora, by organizing seminars and by giving individual supervision to Russian postgraduate students.
It would probably be misleading to call EETACS a project; it is rather an umbrella term listing some objectives shared by the signatory institutions. Unlike a project, it has no funding in the sense ordinary research projects have, nor does it have a defined end date after which the results would be critically assessed. Funding has mostly consisted of travel money received from a number of sources available at the University of Helsinki.
One important aspect of the EETACS collaboration has editing manuscripts held by St Petersburg libraries. During the past years, Leena Kahlas-Tarkka and Matti Kilpiö were working on an edition of three manuscripts of Ann Bathurst’s religious meditations. The edition would cover the whole of the fragmentary autograph kept in the Bodleian Library and the corresponding passage in the fair copies housed in the library of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Bodleian Library.
Guillaume Coatalen (University of Cergy-Pontoise, Paris) has edited autograph letters of Queen Elizabeth I in the National Library of Russia for the VARIENG eSeries.
One result of EETACS collaboration with Russian scholars is volume 9 of the eSeries of VARIENG, Western European Manuscripts and Early Printed Books in Russia: Delving into the Collections of the Libraries in St Petersburg, published in May 2012.