Thank you for this announcement and the efforts going into this project.
A searchable digital version of the complete set of EC would indeed be a wonderful objective. In fact a start was made towards the digitization, with human proofreading of OCR-results, of EC volume I, by Annette Schmiedchen with assistance of Reinhold Gruenendahl a few years ago, but I am not sure how far Dr. Schmiedchen came.
The online availability of good graphic scans of the entire series of EC is of great value in itself. But might I urge you to make more serious work of the "OCR-Volltext"? This is entirely null for the hundreds of pages of contents in Kannada script (which perhaps may be excused if Kannada OCR does not yet exist), but the OCR-ed results for the parts in roman script, in particular the transliterations of the actual inscriptions, appears not to be of much greater value. This means that the search function that is offered will allow nobody to actually find the epigraphic attestations of words that they are looking for.
Would it be possible to for each volume of EC a text-file giving at least the transliterations in carefully checked form, so that people can download these and add them to their own collections of epigraphic text files, or make the actual texts of the inscriptions available in some other useful form, e.g. through GRETIL or SARIT, or through an EpiDoc-based website such as this one <
http://isaw.nyu.edu/publications/inscriptions/campa/index.html>? This will mean a lot of extra work, but will do much more to truly bring Epigraphia Carnatica into the digital age.
Best wishes,
Arlo Griffiths
EFEO/Jakarta