ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 70 | August 2004
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New Archive: Eighteenth Century Collections Online
The National Library is delighted to announce the acquisition of one of the most exciting online archives available. Eighteenth Century Collections Online is a digitised library of nearly 150 000 English and foreign-language titles published in the United Kingdom during this period, together with much of importance from America. Comprising more than 33 million pages, able to be accessed with sophisticated searching capabilities, this collection provides an unequalled opportunity for researchers in many disciplines. Here is the Age of Reason in the full splendour of its major protagonists in such works as the sermons, satires and pamphlets of Swift and Pope and Paine. In fact, 28 major eighteenth century authors, including Edmund Burke, Henry Fielding and Benjamin Franklin, have all their works included in the collection. There are even multiple editions of some works, to enable researchers to compare the various editions. Women writers of the eighteenth century are also well represented and there are collections on the French Revolution too. The digital archive is produced by the Gale Group and is based on
their microfilm product
The tremendous benefit of the digital archive over the microfilm collection is the extensive searchability. The collection is organised in seven subject areas: history and geography; fine arts and social sciences; medicine, science and technology; literature and language; religion and philosophy; law; and general reference. Searching can be restricted to one subject area, or spread over as many areas as desired. Search options include basic and advanced search, browse authors and browse works. If desired, searches may be limited to works published in a particular year or range of years. One option of great delight to many researchers is the ability to search the full text of works for a specific word or phrase; the results have the search term highlighted, and the actual pages containing the term are listed at the side of the results screen for each work found. This means that it is possible to see exactly which authors of that period used a particular phrase or term. Other options include searching for works containing one of nine types of illustrations, and specifying one of eight languages. The results present users with links to a full citation, an eTable of Contents, and a list of illustrations where applicable. Users may also click on a work retrieved and then browse the whole work one page at a time. All works have been comprehensively indexed with many layers of metadata, thus producing a very valuable tool in searching. Eighteenth Century Collections Online is now available to onsite users at the Library. At a future date, it is envisaged that access will also be made available to some registered offsite users. Direct access to the collection onsite is via the Indexes and Databases section of the Librarys website at <www.nla.gov.au/pathways/jnls/newsite/view/1263.html>. You can also view the full range of other resources available from the Librarys Indexes and Databases listing at <www.nla.gov.au/pathways/jnls/newsite/>. For those people who would like a bit of help using the collection, training exercises used in tutorials held at the Library are accessible at <www.nla.gov.au/pathways/trainguides.html>. Catalogue records for all the works in the collection are currently being loaded by Kinetica to the National Bibliographic Database and will also be loaded to the National Librarys catalogue. Each catalogue record will include a direct URL link to the full text of that particular work in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database. Further information on the collection can be found on the
Gale Groups website at <http://www.gale.com/EighteenthCentury/>. The Library is
pleased to be able to provide access to such a valuable resource for
researchers. Eighteenth Century Collections Online is a major
acquisition and a significant enhancement to our Collection. |
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