EEBO: fun for early modernists
I’ve been slacking off work to spend some time on my MA dissertation today. This involves trawling through Early English Books Online, one of the most phenomenal resources you’ll ever come across. The guys at Chadwyck have spent something like a billion person-hours scanning and uploading original books dating from from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of the nineteenth.
The result is an incredible repository of stuff. Want to read the ‘good’ quartos of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet, the ones that Shakespeare probably saw, read and checked himself? EEBO has them. The pirate ‘bad’ quartos? It’s got those too. First edition of Paradise Lost? Check. All the Thomason Tracts? Yes indeedy.
There are holes in the collection, the attributions are sometimes (cough) wrong and the search function is idiosyncratic, but otherwise it’s brill. If you’re a lit or history geek, you can usually get access through your local library. Students should be able to get in via Athens or from a university IP address - it’s definitely worth it.
Comment by Rich — December 5, 2008 @ 10:47 am
EEBO is indeed a fantastic resource, but it doesn’t have the best cataloguing system, so sometimes searches can prove a little tricky - there have been times when I’ve looked for something I knew was on there, but had to try a couple of different ways before it came up.
The best way to use EEBO is in conjunction with the Electronic Short Title Collection (estc.bl.uk). The ESTC is an online, searchable form of the old STC, which is a database of all books published in Britain, or in English,which survived at the time it was compiled (so, there are some books which don’t appear in the STC because they haven’t survived, but we know to have once existed). Some very industrious fellows actually went to every library and noted all the books, and I think it’s been expanded since then.
If you find something on the ESTC, it will give you all kinds of bibliographic information, but best of all it should give you both the ESTC number and the old STC number. It’s then a lot easier to go over to EEBO and put that it, rather than have to mess around with different spellings/formats of titles and names.
Comment by admin — December 5, 2008 @ 10:55 am
Thanks for that, Rich. You’re right that EEBO’s catalogue and search system is a pain in the backside - there are also some surprising holes in the collection. I’ve been after a few newbooks from the 1650s that are still extant, but EEBO doesn’t have them - for that period I think it’s very reliant on Thomason.
(For anyone who hasn’t seen Rich’s blog, it’s well worth a look - http://chronologi.wordpress.com)
Comment by Rich — December 17, 2008 @ 5:02 pm
It is unfortunate that EEBO isn’t complete; but it’s incredible nonetheless. Over this summer I wasn’t technically a student or belonging to an academic institution (’twixt BA and MPhil) and, thus, was unable to get onto EEBO, JSTOR, the Oxford DNB, or any of the other resources I took for granted. It made me appreciate them a whole lot more.
Oh, and thanks for the plug!