An update on Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker

[Edit: fixed a couple of broken links—my apologies. -bp]

I wanted to let readers of this blog know about a couple of updates at Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker that I hope will make the site a valuable adjunct for those who look for early modern books at Google Books and the Internet Archive. These changes should also make it easier for users to contribute links to the site.

For several months, between about November, 2009 and March, 2010, visitors to the site wouldn’t have seen a whole lot happening. During that period, rather than adding new links to the site, I was re-tooling the site’s data model in order to make things more flexible and robust—essentially, I was recreating all of the site’s content along new lines. This was not fun, but I think the results are worth it.

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Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker

Anna Battigelli and Eleanor Shevlin invited me to write a bit about the Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker project that Laura Mandell linked to last week, and I’m happy to do so.

This is a project I began thinking about around a year ago, and to explain some of its premises, I’d best say a bit about the circumstances that gave rise to it. I teach at a mid-sized, primarily undergraduate public university that hasn’t purchased access to ECCO, EEBO, et. al. and, realistically speaking, isn’t ever going to purchase access to them at their current prices. I’m really fortunate to be able to use ECCO and other resources at the University of Connecticut, just a few miles up the road, so my own research isn’t unduly hampered by not having them at my home institution. (What hampers my research is my 4/4 teaching load, but that’s another matter…) I can’t really take advantage of ECCO in my teaching, though, which led me to start exploring resources like Google Books and the Internet Archive. While you can’t beat the price, those sites—and, let’s recall, they’re functionally the only ones that people without institutional access to the big databases can leverage—leave a lot to be desired.

There’s been a lot of good discussion here about the nature of Google Books and the Internet Archive—what they are and aren’t good for, how best to think about them, whether as catalogues/finding aids or as searchable textbases. I hope it won’t seem too contrary of me, then, to say that, at present, they aren’t especially good at being either of those things.