Spotlight: Eighteenth Century Collections Online

August 2006—The Libraries are pleased to announce the addition of a major digital archive of 18th century texts. Eighteenth Century Collections Online, known as ECCO, includes over 150,000 works and 33 million pages, bringing the Libraries' collection to over 300,000 digital books.

ECCO, which presents digitized texts gathered from the British Library and 1,500 other research, public, and private libraries, includes everything significant published in the UK between 1701 and 1800, both English-language and foreign-language titles, plus thousands of important works from the Americas. According to Jay Kirk, Head of Collection Development, ECCO was enthusiastically requested by faculty in several disciplines as a key addition for their research.

The value of this repository is its ability to make available rare material in virtually every academic discipline and texts are drawn from a variety of materials--almanacs, books on every subject, devotional works, magazines, pamphlets and advertisements, songs, and verses. A centerpiece of the collection is the complete works of 28 major eighteenth century authors, including Edmund Burke, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Benjamin Franklin, Edward Gibbon, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Paine, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Adam Smith, and John Wesley. Texts are presented in seven subject areas (follow links for more complete descriptions) that may be searched individually, severally, or as a whole:

• History and Geography: ancient and contemporary history; accounts of voyages and discoveries, biographies and memoirs, genealogical collections, gazetteers, works on church antiquities and tourist guides of Britain
• Social Sciences and Fine Arts: materials on manufacturer and merchants, artisans and skilled workers, international business, banking, taxation, and lotteries. Treatises on music, painting, theater and architecture as well as books on building and carpentry, catalogs pertaining to vocal and instrumental music, paintings, prints, drawings, coins, and material about private art collections
• Medicine, Science, and Technology: many branches of science, works on applied science and technology, and works and treatises on the treatment of diseases and conditions
• Literature and Language: works of eighteenth century essayists, novelists, poets and playwrights, as well as 18th. century editions of Shakespeare works.
• Religion and Philosophy: sermons, Bibles, prayer books, moral and ethical debates, and prescriptions to proper conduct
• Law: development of law in the British Empire between 1701 and 1800
• Reference: ephemeral material on life during the century

Basic searching is by keyword, broad subject area, and date of publication.  Advanced searching allows full text searching, combining terms (and, or, not), language of publication, place of publication, etc.  Users may also browse authors or browse titles.  There are two areas for help, found in the top banner: one labeled "? Help" goes into detail on the database, digitization process, etc.  The other, "Search Tips" goes into detail about diacritics, proximity, wildcards, marking, saving, and e-mailing pages.

All ECCO items have been fully cataloged in MARQCAT; that is, users searching for titles and authors will find records (and hotlinks) for digital books just as they find records for printed books on the shelves.  See these MARQCAT titles as examples:  A Brief Narrative of the Indian Charity-School and A Short View of the History of the New England Colonies.

Link to ECCO.