Accessing Burney and ECCO
We are grateful to Gale/Cengage for providing readers of this blog with access to the Burney Collection from August 19 through October 30, 2009, and to ECCO from September 9 to October 30, 2009. Many readers were able to explore these rich text-bases in full.
We hope this access has promoted an awareness of these text-bases’ power, both for scholarship and for teaching. We also encourage those who shared this access with students to write about the full range of that experience. Sharing those teaching experiences, as Dave Mazella has done on this site and as Laura Rosenthal and others have done on The Long Eighteenth, helps us see better how useful these text-bases are in the classroom. It also helps us identify potential problems and prepare for them. We hope readers will continue to talk about how these digital tools affect both scholarship and the classroom.
Again, many thanks to Gale/Cengage for allowing this rich learning experience.
[Former posting]
Gale/Cengage has generously provided readers of emob with access to ECCO and to the Burney Collection of newspapers through October 30, 2009. These text-bases can be accessed by clicking here.
August 25, 2009 at 12:43 am |
[...] As I mentioned in today’s discussion, I’m putting up here and on the Resource page the link to the Burney Newspaper collection, courtesy of the 18c bibliography blog (EMOB) that I participate [...]
September 16, 2009 at 9:46 am |
I am very grateful to Prof. Battigelli and this forum for arranging the free access periods on ECCO and the Burney Collection and for announcing it on C18-L. As someone whose institution has no access to these collections, this opportunity is extremely valuable and much appreciated.
Dr. Amy Garnai
Tel Aviv University
September 16, 2009 at 9:52 am |
Many of us work at institutions that do not subscribe to these online databases. Access is an important issue and will be something we will need to discuss.
In the meantime, it would be lovely to hear more from you and from others about the utility of ECCO and Burney, both in the classroom and in your research.
September 16, 2009 at 12:33 pm |
ECCO has been crucial in my research. I work on print culture in the 1790s; my book (and the dissertation from which it evolved) examines the writings of Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson and Elizabeth Inchbald. Some of their writings have not appeared in modern editions and I was able to access these works through ECCO, both when I was in England and through free access periods that were offered at various times. In fact, the free access period offered last spring, when I was doing the final revisions of my book, literally saved me a trip to London. I only started working with the Burney later, but I can already see that it will be very useful for my new research project. The search function in both collections is, for me, an extremely useful feature and helped me track down important details and references in a very efficient manner.
At the same time, my new research also involves American writings of the 1790s, and the Burney collection isn’t as strong with American newspapers of this period. What I probably need is a database such as “America’s Historical Newspapers”, but at this point I know little about that resource. I wonder if they offer free trial periods or “windows” of access.
September 17, 2009 at 7:45 pm |
Amy,
I would contact both your librarian and Readex, the company that is responsible for “America’s Historical Newspapers” and similar American historical digitize collections. I don’t see any immediate information on their website that they do give trials, but they might be willing to do so.