Library Resource

This post is part of a series of “Resources and Services” posts from the Faculty of Cowles Library.

What You’ll Find in ECCO

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) includes primary source content from over 200,000 books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, and other documents:

• printed from 1701 to 1800;
• printed in the British Isles, Colonial America, the United States of America (1776-1800), Canada, or British territories, in all languages;
• printed in any other part of the world, wholly or partly in English or other British vernacular.

The foundation of ECCO comprises publications from the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalog (ESTC) project. In 1977, the British Library and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies began a joint project whose aim was “to create a machine-readable union catalogue of books, pamphlets and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1701 to 1800.” [1] The project was later expanded to digitize and include publications dating back to 1473 (and was renamed the English Short Title Catalog), but the ECCO database contains the ESTC content from 1701-1800.

ECCO presents content as images of original book pages. You can search the text of these pages and download up to 250 pages as PDF files. ECCO contains content supporting research in literature, history, music, religion, medicine, law, linguistics, fine arts, and more.

Searching ECCO

Like most databases, ECCO provides a Basic and Advanced search. The Basic Search allows you to search for terms in the Keyword, Title, Subject, and Author fields, or within the pages of the documents themselves. You can enter a date limit and choose from one or more subject areas.

The Advanced search allows you to do all of the above, as well as combine terms from different fields, specify additional search fields (e.g., Publisher, Place of Publication), limit by Language, limit by Illustration type, and apply a “Fuzzy Search” option. Fuzzy Search looks for near matches and variant spellings of your search terms. Because of the variant spellings often found in historical documents, as well as the possibility of scanning errors during digitization, we recommend setting Fuzzy Search to at least Low.

Research Tools in ECCO

Be sure to consult ECCO’s Research Tools to explore detailed and carefully crafted Historical Contexts. These documents are essentially entries from reference works on a topic (e.g., French Revolution, War of American Independence, Slavery and the Slave Trade, Enlightenment) that present an overview of the topic within the context of the eighteenth century.

The Key Documents section provides an overview of what you can expect to find on a given topic in ECCO, where the collection’s strengths lie, and a list of important works (including links) in that subject area. Here, for example, is an excerpt from the “History and Geography” Key Document overview:

The history and geography collection, although rich in titles on English life and history, spans the world as it was known to eighteenth-century historians and travelers. It is particularly strong in ancient history, including many editions of Edward Gibbon’s masterpiece, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The user will also find numerous histories of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and the nations and states of Europe (with particular strength in histories of the Scandinavian countries), as well as histories of Russia. The collection is strong in titles on the French Revolution, particularly English responses to it.

If you have questions about how to use Eighteenth Century Collections Online, reach out to a librarian.

This post is part of a series of “Resources and Services” posts from the Faculty of Cowles Library.

Historical Abstracts is one of the many databases the Drake community has access to through Cowles Library. If you are looking for research articles on non-American history, this should be one of your first stops.

Doing historical research of Canada or the United States? You should check out America: History and Life.

Looking for articles on the history of anywhere else in the world? You should use Historical Abstracts.  Historical Abstracts indexes and gives abstracts for over 2000 journals. It includes key historical journals from almost every major country as well as a great selection of journals in the social sciences and humanities that are of interest to researchers of history.

A few questions I’ve heard over the years from users of this resource:

Q: What is an Abstract?
A: An abstract is a summary of an article. Historical Abstracts gives summaries and index terms to the articles in its database. Users can read the abstracts to see if the article is something they are interested in.

Q: Why isn’t there full-text available for all of the articles I find in this database?
A: That’s a long story, mostly it’s because of expense. We can get you any article you find in the database. If there isn’t full text, click on Check for Full Text @ Drake . This may lead you to the full text article. If it does not, it will lead you to Interlibrary Loan.

Q: What is Interlibrary Loan?
A: We have another library send us a copy of the article for you. For more information go to Interlibrary Loan 

Any questions about using Historical Abstracts? Just ask!