Enfilade

ASECS members will likely already have received news of this new perk, but it could be most useful for people who are not (yet) members. Please note the North American stipulation. Press release (28 July 2021) from Gale:

New partnership gives ASECS members access to the world’s largest collection on the eighteenth-century, advancing research and instruction of the period.

Gale, a Cengage company, has partnered with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), the world’s largest organization of eighteenth-century scholars, to provide its North American members[i] with access to Gale’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Now ASECS members have access to the most comprehensive online historical archive on the eighteenth-century, enabling scholarship, enhanced teaching and advanced study of the era.

“ECCO is an essential resource for scholars of the eighteenth-century, but many people working in the field do not currently have access to it. They have to travel across the world to research libraries to view and study eighteenth-century collections, which can be very expensive,” said Mark Boonshoft, executive director at ASECS. “By providing online access to ECCO to our members in North America, we help ameliorate this inequity and better support research and teaching on the eighteenth-century. We are thrilled to partner with Gale to make this happen.”

ECCO contains every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom between the years 1701 and 1800, offering scholars full-text searching across 26 million pages of books and directories, bibles, sheet music, sermons, advertisements and works by both celebrated and lesser-­known authors. Expanding the ECCO archive, the titles in Part II have an emphasis on literature, social science, and religion. It also includes nearly fifty thousand titles and seven million pages from the library holdings of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, University of Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

With ASECS members coming from a wide range of disciplines and professions beyond academia, ECCO access will:
• Put the world’s largest archive on the eighteenth-century in the hands of hundreds of scholars, creating greater public awareness and understanding of the eighteen-century world.
• Provides access to independent scholars (those without university affiliation), making it easier for them to conduct research on the eighteenth-century.
• Expand scholarship and research to less endowed institutions and independent researchers, with continued access to eighteenth-century content outside of academia.

“As the leading provider of digital humanities learning tools and primary sources to support research, Gale is committed to promoting scholarship on the eighteenth-century,” said Roger Strong, vice president of sales for academic libraries at Gale. “This partnership with ASECS enable us to more closely align resources like ECCO to course integration and digital humanities pedagogy, including joint efforts around the sharing of research outcomes, and the continued development of primary source tools and platforms to support the future needs of ASECS and other learned societies.”

ASECS north American members can access ECCO at: https://www.asecs.org/ecco.

i. Due to pre-existing licensing arrangements, access to Eighteenth Century Collections Online is limited to ASECS members in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean.