This is a list of the major, freely accessible, digital libraries holding significant quantities of British printed material of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (or at least those I know of). These collections are of very variable levels of quality, transparency and curation; they hold material from other periods and places; some are more organized and thematic, some more a random selection from the shelves.<\/p>\n
Additionally, there are two indexing projects at the end of the list, the C18th Book Tracker and Penn’s Online Books, both of which provide better metadata than found in Google Books, Hathi Trust and the Internet Archive.<\/p>\n
Please notify me in the comments for anything I have missed.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.digitale-sammlungen.de\/<\/a><\/p>\n Two and a half million items, including a fairly considerable number of English language items. Interface in German, English and Italian.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.biodiversitylibrary.org\/browse\/year\/1700\/1799#\/titles<\/a><\/p>\n 3,867 c18th titles at the time of writing (25 August 2020), and several hundred journal articles, on all aspects of natural history. Includes many non-British titles; the whole collection holds over one hundred thousand volumes.<\/p>\n Not yet restored after the 2023 hacking of the British Library websites, many digitized volumes fromt eh B.L.are available through Google Books.<\/p>\n http:\/\/ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n Thousands of broadsides from the Bodleian library. Very good site.<\/p>\n https:\/\/rmc.library.cornell.edu\/witchcraftcoll\/<\/a><\/p>\n 104 English language books, most pre-1800, relating to witchcraft.<\/p>\n https:\/\/digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk<\/a><\/p>\n Given that the Bodleian broadside collection is very good, I am completely boggled at how incomprehensible this site is. There’s stuff here, good luck navigating it.<\/p>\n http:\/\/dqc.esr.earlham.edu:8080\/xmlmm\/login.html<\/a><\/p>\n From Earlham School of Religion, over 500 works on Quakers, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (and a few from the nineteenth). Clunky interface, but fully transcribed texts.<\/p>\n http:\/\/ebba.english.ucsb.edu\/<\/a><\/p>\n 9,352 early modern broadside ballads, as of mid May 2020. A truly excellent website, rich, useable and even featuring recordings of the songs.<\/p>\n https:\/\/curiosity.lib.harvard.edu\/crime-broadsides<\/a><\/p>\n Circa 600 broadsides, mainly nineteenth century, but some eighteenth as well.<\/p>\n https:\/\/foundling.soutron.net\/Portal\/Default\/en-GB\/Search\/SimpleSearch<\/a><\/p>\n Courtesy of the Foundling Museum, a collection related to the composer Handel, some of which has been digitized.<\/p>\n https:\/\/books.google.com\/<\/a>\u00a0(and innumerable local domains, such as https:\/\/books.google.co.uk\/<\/a>)<\/p>\n Probably the biggest digital library in the world, probably the biggest library of digitized eighteenth century material, probably really good, but so opaque who can tell. There is no way of knowing how much is in there, no list of titles to analyze, no way of conducting any sort of bulk investigation beyond Google’s own ngrams, granular search is absurdly complicated and limited given that search is Google’s metier, and the metadata continues to be a train-wreck.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.hathitrust.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n A great deal of material viewable, but little of it freely downloadable without an American university subscription or a very helpful and morally just tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n https:\/\/archive.org\/index.php<\/a><\/p>\n A colossal amount of material in general, some digitised under its own auspices, some scraped from elsewhere (especially Google Books), some uploaded by the general public. Easily the most open and accessible of the archives, everything is available for downloading, even in bulk, but the metadata sometimes erroneous and the OCR is generally poor. As of 23 August 2020, their search returns 271,351 texts<\/a> dated 1700 – 1799.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.tu-chemnitz.de\/phil\/english\/sections\/linguist\/real\/independent\/lampeter\/lamphome.htm<\/a><\/p>\n 120 texts, fully transcribed, spanning 1640 to 1740. Also available in the Oxford Text Archive.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.thegazette.co.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n Occasionally mis-curated, sometimes poor quality images, frequently awful OCR for the eighteenth century, but generally an invaluable archive of the official state newspaper, a very rich yet under-used source.<\/p>\n https:\/\/www.lancaster.ac.uk\/fass\/projects\/newsbooks\/fumig.htm<\/a><\/p>\n Interregnum newsbook, “characterised by a mixture of ribald reports of debauchery, crude humour, and (superficially) fantastical or whimsical nonsense-stories and poems.” An absolute scream.<\/p>\n Crawford Collection: https:\/\/digital.nls.uk\/broadsides-from-the-crawford-collection\/archive\/144782273<\/a><\/p>\n English Ballads: https:\/\/digital.nls.uk\/english-ballads\/archive\/<\/a><\/p>\n The Word on the Street: https:\/\/digital.nls.uk\/broadsides\/index.html<\/a><\/p>\n The NLS has a variety of digitized material, not easily browsable as it is split into separate parts. The three collections linked here are all of broadsides and ballads; well curated, but I’m mystified why they are separate, and don’t know if there is any overlap in content.<\/p>\n https:\/\/openworks.wooster.edu\/notestein\/<\/a><\/p>\n Small collection of English Civil War pamphlets and material on Witch trials.<\/p>\n Long ugly URL<\/a><\/p>\n Nearly 12,000 digitizations, including a significant number of c18th publications, focussed on Ireland and British state documents. Includes the Dublin Gazette for the 1700s. Horrible, clumsy interface but quality copies. Some of the material is now available through Jstor<\/a>.<\/p>\n Old Bailey Proceedings: https:\/\/www.oldbaileyonline.org\/browse.jsp?dir=sessionsPapers<\/a><\/p>\n Ordinary’s Account: https:\/\/www.oldbaileyonline.org\/browse.jsp?dir=ordinarysAccounts<\/a><\/p>\n Although best known for its excellently transcribed and curated manuscript material, OBPO also has runs as complete as possible of the Ordinary’s Accounts and the Old Bailey Proceedings.<\/p>\n https:\/\/ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk\/repository\/xmlui\/<\/a><\/p>\n Circa 7,000 c18th texts, and much more besides, the majority open and publicly accessible. Clean layout, easy to use. Contains most, if not all,\u00a0 of the TCP texts.<\/p>\n https:\/\/digitised-collections.unimelb.edu.au\/handle\/11343\/242305<\/a><\/p>\n 93 items concerning the supposed ‘Popish plots’ of Restoration England, from the University of Melbourne.<\/p>\n https:\/\/textcreationpartnership.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n Transcribing the EEBO and ECCO collections, and making them freely available. Vast collection, with more to come in January 2021.<\/p>\n https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/ukmhl<\/a><\/p>\n Thousands of works, spanning nearly 500 years, on medicine in the widest sense of the term. Volumes digitized from numerous U.K. libraries, and hosted on the Internet Archive.<\/p>\n http:\/\/archives.law.virginia.edu\/catalogue\/<\/a><\/p>\n Recreating the first law library at the University of Virginia, with full digitizations of 336 of the 375 legal volumes therein.<\/p>\n https:\/\/en.wikisource.org\/w\/index.php?title=Category:Works_by_year&subcatfrom=1663%0A1663+works#mw-subcategories<\/a><\/p>\n Problematic in many ways, but hundreds of transcribed texts, some to a very high standard.<\/p>\n http:\/\/benjaminpauley.net\/c18booktracker\/<\/a><\/p>\n An index to freely-available digital facsimilies of eighteenth century works on Google, Interenet Archive, Hathi Trust etc. Not complete – an impossible task! – but a very useful and useable interface. Also collates various series of\u00a0 c18th periodicals.<\/p>\n https:\/\/onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu\/<\/a><\/p>\n Massive collation of links to openly available books. Not easy to browse by date, but searching is easy.<\/p>\n https:\/\/opentexts.world\/<\/a><\/p>\n Defunct, as of July 2023.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a list of the major, freely accessible, digital libraries holding significant quantities of British printed material of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (or at least those I know of). These collections are of very variable levels of quality, … Continue reading Biodiversity Heritage Library<\/h3>\n
British Library<\/h3>\n
Broadside Ballads Online<\/h3>\n
Cornell Witchcraft Collection<\/h3>\n
Digital Bodleian<\/h3>\n
Digital Quaker Archives<\/h3>\n
English Broadside Ballad Archive<\/h3>\n
English Crime and Execution Broadsides<\/h3>\n
Gerald Coke Handel Collection<\/h3>\n
Google Books<\/h3>\n
Hathi Trust<\/h3>\n
Internet Archive<\/h3>\n
Lampeter Corpus<\/h3>\n
London Gazette<\/h3>\n
Mercurius Fumigosus<\/h3>\n
National Library of Scotland<\/h3>\n
Notestein Library<\/h3>\n
Oireachtas Archive<\/h3>\n
Old Bailey Online<\/h3>\n
Oxford Text Archive<\/h3>\n
Popish Plots Collection<\/h3>\n
Text Creation Partnership<\/h3>\n
U.K. Medical heritage Library<\/h3>\n
University of Virginia 1828 Library Project<\/h3>\n
Wikisource<\/h3>\n
INDEXES<\/h3>\n
Eighteenth Century Book Tracker<\/h3>\n
Online Books at Penn<\/h3>\n
Open Texts<\/h3>\n