ECCO proving 'essential' for specialist subjects
The eighteenth century was one of the richest and most extraordinary centuries in this country’s history, one in which many of our most important institutions became established, and one in which many of the subjects and disciplines taught in our colleges and universities were first formalised and studied.
Now through the Jisc agreement for Eighteenth Century Collections Online, this resource and the entire century’s publications can be brought to the desktops of every college and university in the country.
ECCO, from publishers Thomson Gale, is the world’s most comprehensive digital library of eighteenth-century printed books, and represents the largest single digitisation project ever undertaken. It includes almost 138,000 printed titles and editions published in Great Britain and the colonies between 1701 and 1800, and allows the full text searching of around 26 million pages, taking the user directly to facsimile copies of every title as first published.
The resource has obvious uses in a wide range of subjects, including history, English literature, geography, the sciences, philosophy and much more. What is becoming increasingly apparent, however, is that ECCO is providing an invaluable tool for researchers in a wide range of more specialist subject areas.
Professor Andrew Prescott is a medieval historian and expert on humanities computing. He leads the University of Sheffield's Centre for Research into Freemasonry and not only uses ECCO but says that it has helped uncover specialist texts in Freemasonry as well as references in general texts of the period. He explains: 'One of the most distinctive and fascinating 18th-century social innovations was Freemasonry, which throughout Europe provided a vehicle for the discussion and spread of new ideas and helped spread Enlightenment values. Recent research has shown, for example, how women's masonic lodges provided a major means of access for women to the emerging public sphere.’
Specialist texts in such subjects as the study of Freemasonry are, however, by their very nature, elusive. ‘Freemasonry became a favourite subject of many European publishers,’ Professor Prescott says, ‘but many of these books are rare and difficult to locate, and there are few specialist masonic bibliographies to help trace them.’
So how is ECCO helping? ‘The Eighteenth Century Collection Online not only allows these works to be more readily accessed,’ Andrew Prescott answers, ‘but also enables hitherto unnoticed references to Freemasonry in general works of the period readily to be identified.’
Reproducing works held at some of the most important and prestigious libraries in the world, ECCO is bringing a wealth of scholarship to thousands of lecturers, students and researchers across the country. As Professor Prescott says: ‘ECCO is an essential component of the electronic collections of any good research library'.