'Eighteenth Century Collections Online' (ECCO) provides National Library of Scotland readers with full-text access to some 150,000 books printed between 1701 and 1800. In essence, every significant English-language and non-English-language title printed in the United Kingdom and the former British territories is available, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.
You can search for titles, authors, or words in the text — and then go straight to digital copies of the original pages.
Access to this major resource is available to National Library of Scotland readers who;
- Use ECCO within the Library
- Register for remote access (conditions apply).
About ECCO
ECCO was produced by digitising items from the microfilm series 'The Eighteenth Century' (which is also held by the Library, shelfmark Mf.134). It complements the resource 'Early English Books Online' (EEBO), which contains digital images of books printed between 1473 and 1700, and which can also be accessed online from within the Library.
Important features
Some particularly important features of ECCO include the fact that:
- All the books digitised (some 30 million pages) have been scanned using optical character recognition (OCR), which allows you to search for words within the text
- You can also print selected pages
- You can view and print pages as PDF files.
We also plan to provide direct access to the titles within ECCO from the library catalogue.
Searching and viewing pages
As well as basic searching, there are also advanced search options:
- You can look for books with particular types of illustration, or limit searches to a particular date or language.
- You can also search for books by their reference numbers from the English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), an online bibliographical database which includes details of every work in ECCO, and which is available for visitors to the Library.
- When you have opened a book, you can read through it a page at a time, or go straight to a particular page number.
For more detailed information on how to use 'Eighteenth Century Collections Online', please use the online help within ECCO.
For enquiries regarding the use of ECCO, please contact: rarebooks@nls.uk