News release

From the University Library

01 August 2005

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) now available

ECCO, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, is the most ambitious single digitisation project ever undertaken, and it is now available at the University of Southampton. It offers wide access not only to a century of the nation's intellectual heritage, but also to works from earlier periods which were valued and printed or reprinted during the eighteenth century.

ECCO is a library of over 135,000 eighteenth-century printed books, with more than 26 million scanned facsimile pages. Each title has a full citation record from the English Short Title Catalogue and is fully searchable - including full-text and illustrations.

It is probable that individual records will never exist on WebCat for all the books contained in this resource, since these represent an expansion of the whole of Southampton University Library's monograph holdings by something like 20 per cent - a considerable cataloguing undertaking. But the collection is self-limiting: users just need to be aware that ECCO should include most letterpress materials printed in Great Britain or any of its dependencies in any language in the course of the eighteenth century — as well as materials printed in English anywhere else in the world during that time.

Access