Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Eighteenth Century Collections Online contains over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes) and more than 32 million pages, making ECCO the premier and irreplaceable resource for eighteenth-century research.

As well as titles from the regions stated above, material printed is included from elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories.

Users of ECCO Part I and Part II can full-text search the collection via an intuitive user interface. In addition, MARC record/metadata enhancements, a research guide section for undergraduates with contextual essays and chronology, an image gallery, and a key documents section facilitate discovery and study.

Institutions with access to ECCO and Early English Books Online (EEBO) from ProQuest are able to cross-search both collections. Users can extend their searches across centuries of publications, from the first book printed in the English language through to the folios of Shakespeare and the classics of Defoe.

BOOKS WRITTEN ABOUT ECCO

Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online
Written by Dr. Stephen H. Gregg
Published online by Cambridge University Press | 23 December 2020

A history of Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, this open access publication written by Stephen H Gregg, examines ECCO's prehistory as, first, a computer catalogue of eighteenth-century print, and then as a commercial microfilm collection, before moving to the digitisation and development of the interfaces to ECCO, as well as Gale's various partnerships and licensing deals.

An essential aspect of Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online is how it explores the socio-cultural and technological debates around the access to old books from the 1930s to the present day. Since the book published in 2020, Gale has migrated ECCO to a more modern platform, and these have been examined in this blog – posted in April 2022.

Platform Features & Tools

Term Frequency

Researchers can see the frequency of search terms within sets of content to begin identifying central themes and assessing how individuals, events, and ideas interact and develop over time.

Topic Finder

By grouping commonly occurring themes, this tool reveals hidden connections within search terms—helping to shape research by integrating diverse content with relevant information.

Cross-Search Capability

Search across the content of complementary primary source products in one intuitive environment, enabling innovative new research connections.

Learn more about the Gale Primary Sources Platform » »

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