ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 75 | June 2005
Document Delivery from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) The Internet has opened up a whole new world of discovery for researchers and scholars and one very significant resource in particular, now available through the National Library of Australia, is ECCO or Eighteenth Century Collections Online. To quote from Directions for 2003–2005 published by the National Library, ‘Our major undertaking in 2003–2005 will be to provide rapid and easy access to the wealth of information resources that reside in libraries and other cultural institutions and to break down barriers that work against this. Services supporting access to library information will be simplified and made more user-friendly, and will be widely promoted.’ The National Library has certainly achieved this with access to the full text database of ECCO. This unique online collection is divided into seven subject areas: history and geography, social science and fine arts, medicine, science and technology, literature and language, religion and philosophy, law and reference. It is full-text and very user-friendly. It is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue, a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1500 university, private and public libraries worldwide. What the reader sees on the screen is an image of the actual page from an 18th-century publication. As an example of the wealth of material now available, the complete works of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (all 500 editions!), widely regarded as the first English novel, are now a few key clicks away. The National Library makes this resource available to both on-site users and through interlibrary loan to users in other libraries. Copies of works found on ECCO can be ordered and delivered via interlibrary loans. Requests can be sent to the Document Supply Service via KDD, email, fax or mail as a normal interlibrary loan request. |
| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |