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NLA News - home March 2005 Volume XV Number 6

Putting the Eighteenth Century Online

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Robinson Crusoe
Reproduced from The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York ... Written by Himself, by Daniel Defoe (London: 1719)
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

 

Margaret Dent describes the capabilities of ECCO, the new online resource now available to scholars of the eighteenth century

The eighteenth century conjures up images of elegant men and women in silk and satin, with wigs and powdered hair, and fluttering fans. The reality was rather more tumultuous as it was a period of huge social and technological change—political and industrial revolution, and major discoveries in science and medicine. It was also a time when people rushed into print with their discoveries and opinions, generating a vast number of printed texts for historians and other researchers to investigate.

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Front page of The Beauties of All the Magazines Selected for January 1784 (England: 3 vols, 1762-1764)
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

 

Access to these texts is not always easy, however, as they are scattered among numerous libraries and many are very scarce. So, keying-in a phrase from an eighteenth-century text and finding out within seconds not only who wrote it but also exactly where it appears among almost 150 000 works—and being able to see an image of it—sounds like an impossible dream. Once, it was; researchers could only find out what people thought and wrote in the past by tracking down actual physical copies of the texts that were created at the time. Then to find an individual phrase it was necessary either to know just where to look for it, or be prepared to spend a great deal of time reading through likely texts searching for it.

The first great step forward came with the compilation of the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), an amalgamated list of library holdings of English works published from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In this context, ‘English’ means published in the English language, or in any language within Great Britain or its dominions. The ESTC originated in work begun in 1977, and was the base for the second step forward: the microfilm called The Eighteenth Century. This microfilm set meant that libraries could own texts that were too scarce or too expensive to buy as originals. The National Library of Australia’s holdings of the first 5600 reels of this set were welcomed by researchers, though the accessibility of microfilm can be accompanied by some headaches. Microfilm is not as easy to page-through as printed books, it needs a very good index in order to locate the desired item among thousands of reels of film, it can be scratched during use and so become illegible and, finally, many users find that reading it for long periods literally does cause headaches.

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Title page of A Compendious History of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage ... and the Track of the Ships (London: 1794)
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

 

The final breakthrough came in 2003 when the firm Thomson Gale released the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). When first proposed some years ago, ECCO seemed formidably ambitious. Now, digitised from the microfilms made for The Eighteenth Century project, it is a reality. ECCO is a research tool that makes full use of the capabilities of the Internet. The Internet is the perfect vehicle for an archive like this as it offers rapid access, powerful searching, easy printing—and no problems with storage space, retrieval or reshelving. Individual items cannot be misplaced or damaged so, even when originals are held by a library that also has ECCO, use of the database will generally be preferred both for its convenience and speed and to save wear and tear of the originals. The National Library of Australia has purchased ECCO and offers researchers access to it through the computers in its reading rooms. The collection includes a full bibliographic description for every item, and these records have been placed on the Library’s catalogue so that researchers, wherever they are, can identify items they want to work with when they visit the Library.

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Title page of The Complete English Cook; or, Prudent Housewife, by Catharine Brooks (London: [1770])
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

 

What can this marvel of technology do for its users? Firstly, it is enormous—it contains the full text of more than 33 million pages published in almost 150 000 English works (and thousands of important American items) that appeared between 1701 and 1800 and are held in the British Library and over 1500 other libraries (national, research, university, public and private) around the world. Secondly, it is powerful—searching is fast and flexible, and allows different combinations of terms or fields. The search screens are extremely easy to use, and the ‘help’ and ‘search tips’ information is very clear and easy to follow.

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Title page of The First Edition Ever Published, of Boyle’s New Fashionable Court and Country Guide; and Town Visiting Directory, for the Year 1796, by Patrick Boyle (London: 1796)
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

 

A user can search ECCO in ways unimaginable when author, title and subject were the standard methods, and an index of printers and places of printing was an innovation. Basic and advanced author and title searches are available, of course, but searches can also be made on key words, phrases, groups of words within a specified number of positions from each other, chapter or section headings, the full text and particular parts of the work such as ‘front matter’ or introduction, publisher, and back-of-book indexes. Searches can be limited by a date or a range of dates, by any of seven subject areas, by any of eight languages, or can even be limited to works containing specific types of illustration such as portraits, maps or coats of arms.

Searching on the word ‘kangaroo’ produces eight hits, one of them with an illustration. A search for use of the word ‘Australia’ before 1780 yields 31 hits, reflecting the roots from which our country’s name grew. The results can be arranged by author, title, or by earliest or latest date. Truncation and ‘fuzzy’ or ‘near-match’ searching increases the number of possibly useful hits—truncation to ‘australi’ finds forms such as ‘australis’ and yields 278 hits, and low-level fuzzy searching yields 406. It can still be a challenge to identify relevant material where real names were deliberately obscured by the use of asterisks, dashes, or satirical allusions.

ECCO includes publications on three highly significant events in the world’s history: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. All of these had far-reaching effects on the lives of many people, from monarchs to working classes. The collection enables these and many other topics to be studied in great detail, assembling previously unconnected works and making links between them. It contains the complete works of 28 important authors, such as Benjamin Franklin, Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, and all 500 editions of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, first published in 1719 and widely regarded as the first English novel. Where a work appeared in many editions with important variations, the database offers all the texts to enable comparisons. The microfilm was made from original printed works, so the image a user sees on the ECCO screen is the page as it looked in the actual book.

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Title page of The Just Complaint of the Poor Weavers ...by Daniel Defoe (London: 1791)
Eighteenth Century Collections Online

 

One of the invaluable characteristics of the collection is its aim for inclusiveness. All topics are covered, and there are no exclusions because a subject was considered less important or unlikely to be of interest to researchers. This means that the collection provides the source materials for research topics uncontemplated at present, but which may be important for future scholars. Not only is there a wide variety of subjects (even cookery books are included) but also of formats. As well as books there are pamphlets, bibles, sermons, poems, satires, printed ephemera, and single-sheet works known as broadsides.

ECCO is at present being used in the Library for at least three major, and very diverse, research projects: adultery and divorce in the late eighteenth century, military memoirs, and the Ladies of Llangollen (a pair of eccentric Irishwomen who set up house in Wales in 1780 and whose relationship was the object of much speculation in Regency society).

The first of these three projects is a joint one: an in-depth investigation of the published records of divorce trials in the 1780s and 1790s, being made by Dr Sarah Lloyd, a historian, and Dr Gillian Russell, who works in the field of eighteenth-century literature and cultural history. ECCO is invaluable for their project as its search capabilities have enabled them to change the type of research they can do, and to find publications not previously known to them or discoverable from printed catalogues. They liken its finding power, compared with that of the microfilm, to using an online catalogue instead of a card catalogue. It has also saved a great deal of time in accessing material; where once they had to submit requests for microfilm reels either from the Library’s holdings or from other libraries, now they can see material immediately, decide quickly whether it is of use to the project, and use the time saved for further research.

Dr Lloyd and Dr Russell are impressed by the ease and power of searching and by the remarkable variety of the content. For instance, they can search all 33 million pages using the term ‘criminal conversation’ (a contemporary term for extramarital sexual intercourse), which would not be practicable when working with print or microfilm, and this often reveals references to sources in unexpected places. When the results are presented, the search term is highlighted on the relevant pages, making the searcher’s task even easier. Users are permitted to print from ECCO provided they observe copyright restrictions, and Dr Lloyd and Dr Russell find that the database gives prints of much higher quality than the microfilm version does.

Despite its vast size, ECCO does not contain every item that appeared in the eighteenth century, in particular most journals. The microfilm set Early English Newspapers, held by the Library, is a valuable supplement to the database. Researchers have found that some monograph items that they know of are not on ECCO, particularly those from among the holdings of Australian libraries. So in some cases other sources still need to be used in conjunction with ECCO, and Libraries Australia, the search service for the National Bibliographic Database, still has a valued part to play in locating for researchers the items not included in ECCO.

MARGARET DENT is a curator of exhibitions, and former Rare Books Librarian, at the National Library of Australia

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