Electronic sources for further research

Summary

Today's historian has been blessed by the production of a large number of electronic search engines for Enlightenment materials, search engines which can often obviate the need for travel to distant libraries and archives. Undoubtedly the premier of these search engines is ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), a research database that includes every significant English- and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with many works from North America. (Searches for North American materials should be supplemented by Evans Early American Imprint.) ECCO is scanned rather than transcribed, which can lead to problems reading faint or broken type. But the extent of its reach makes it an invaluable research tool. It holds more than 32 million pages of text and over 205,000 individual volumes, all fully searchable. However, ECCO is not without its problems. Students should consult Patrick Spedding, ‘“The New Machine”: Discovering the Limits of ECCO’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 44 (2011), 437–53. ECCO is also discussed on http://earlymodernonlinebib.wordpress.com/category/ecco.

Some leading research libraries host similar if inevitably smaller projects. The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris offers a large searchable range of scanned original editions for free download at http://gallica.bnf.fr. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, hosts a project known as Electronic Enlightenment. This is primarily concerned with correspondence and related documentation, and is also a unique community project ‘continually building new research into its database and encouraging external users to participate in its evolution’. The project also runs an annual colloquium on the sociology of the letter. It can be accessed at www.e-enlightenment.com. At the British Library in London, a digitisation project will make available online out-of-copyright books published between 1700 and 1870, the majority from continental Europe.