Researching primary sources just got easier for the Northwestern community. By June more than 150,000 books published in Britain during the 18th century will be available online through the University Library’s electronic resource finder.
Half of the database, which contains more than 33 million facsimile pages of text and graphics, is already loaded and accessible. NU is one of 51 universities worldwide to purchase the $125,000 system.
“When the English department heard that we bought this, they threw a party with champagne,” said Jeffrey Garrett, assistant librarian for NU’s collection management department. “It’s revolutionary.”
The Eighteenth Century Collection Online is the complete set of all searchable text and page images published in Great Britain and its colonies from 1701 to 1800.
“It’s just stupefying how quickly you can use it and find a tremendous amount of information,” said Lawrence Lipking, an English and comparative-literature professor. “It’s just like using Google — you don’t have to be a scholar to use it.”
ECCO is an asset to graduate students and professors because it enables them to do primary research at the library by viewing the exact original texts, said Melvin Pena, a graduate student in English.
“It’s a huge boon to our primary research capabilities,” Pena said. “It’s full-text searchable and it’s going to revolutionize the way we do primary research.”
ECCO can be searched for 18th century names, places, commodities or themes — however famous or obscure. The search results can be narrowed and sorted, and ECCO highlights the search term on the page so the term is presented in its exact historical context.
The database is sorted into disciplinary groups, such as history and geography, fine arts, social sciences, medicine, and science and technology.
“It’s going to be of use to scholars in all of the humanities departments,” Pena said. “I think it’s going to be a phenomenal investment.”
Only about 50 percent of the database is loaded so far. Language and literature texts, the next category to be loaded, are slated to appear online in April. By June the entire collection is expected to be accessible.
“Once it’s all uploaded, it is going to be something that will attract a lot of attention,” Pena said.
Pena said he thinks ECCO will be a major attraction and will help in the recruitment of professors and scholars to NU.
Charlotte Cubbage, library bibliographer for english and commonwealth literature, said the library’s greatest challenge is raising awareness about ECCO and the wealth of resources that students can access.
“It’s an immense repository and an amazing project to be able to put this up online,” Cubbage said. “This is certainly the wave of the future.”
