Library News & Events

Described as “the most ambitious single scholarly digitization project ever undertaken,” Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), is an online database containing records for every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the UK during the 18^th century. It also includes thousands of works from the Americas. ECCO II, the second part of the original ECCO database, now contains over 46,000 new catalog records. Parts one and two combined contain 182,898 titles covering seven major subject areas from world-renowned institutions such as the British Library, Bodleian, Cambridge, National Library of Scotland and National Library of Ireland. That’s over 32 million pages of text!

The original ECCO includes materials that had been scanned up until the end of 2002. Since the release of ECCO in 2003, Gale has slowly continued to discover new materials relevant to the database, spurring the creation of ECCO II.

ECCO II covers the same subject areas as the original collection (History and Geography; Social Sciences and Fine Arts; Literature and Language; Religion and Philosophy; Law; General Reference; and Medicine, Science and Technology), with a special emphasis on titles pertaining to Literature, Social Science and Religion. Like its predecessor, ECCO II features full-text search capabilities, canonical titles of the period as well as contemporary works that analyze and debate those titles, and works by both well-known and lesser-known authors. But unlike the original collection, ECCO II carries materials that were previously unavailable or inaccessible, items that were still in the scanning process in 2003, and new items in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC).

Eighteenth Century Collections Online features a wealth of materials, including books and directories, bibles and sheet music, and sermons and pamphlets, adding up to one invaluable resource