There's an ECCO in Here...

The Library has obtained trial access to two excellent research databases from Gale Digital Collections which offer a wealth of resources from the 18th,19th and early 20th centuries.

ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online is an online library of over 136,000 titles and editions (over 155,000 volumes), published between 1701 and 1800. It provides full text searching of more than 26 million pages, giving immediate access to every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom during that period, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.

It is a diverse collection, encompassing everything from books to sheet music to advertisements, from collections on the French Revolution to numerous editions of the works of Shakespeare. Multiple editions of individual works are offered to enable scholars to make textual comparisons of the works.

Subject areas provided for include English Literature, History, Geography, French, Philosophy, Sociology and Fine Arts.

Alongside ECCO, there is The Making of Modern Law: Legal Treatises 1800-1926, also from Gale Digital Collections. This contains fully indexed digitised versions of the Nineteenth Century Legal Treatises and Twentieth Century Legal Treatises collections.  It provides over 10 million pages of legal history from America and Britain, making it the world's most comprehensive full-text collection of Anglo-American legal treatises.

The trial access for both of these databases ends on November 25th so make sure to have a look while they're available!  We'd be glad to receive feedback about them or suggestions for other databases you'd like to try out.

Students and staff of St Patrick's College can access these resources from on or off campus by using the links above or via the Trial Databases page on our website.

Even More From J-STOR

There was good news for scholars recently when our friends from J-STOR kindly opened their vault and made almost 500,000 articles from late 19th and early 20th century publications available free of charge. Better than a poke in the eye, as they say.

This open access content is from a corpus of scholarly articles published in the United States before 1923 and outside the US before 1870. You can see a full list of the free titles here, organised by discipline. Why not have a root around their archives and see what's available in your area? You won't even get dust in your eyes, or if you do you need to clean your keyboard...

 The video below gives a quick tutorial of how to tailor your search:

 You can link to J-STOR from the Databases A-Z on our website.

Go to Harvard For Free...

We like to point our users to open access resources on the web that might be of use for your study or research. One such recommendation is Academic Earth (academicearth.org), an excellent site containing (mostly) free access to courses and lectures recorded by professors from institutions such as MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale and other colleges.

You can watch an individual video or, if you're feeling ambitious, a full series of lectures on a single course. Topics vary from the philosophy of death to the American novel since 1945.

In total there are over 1,500 video hosted on the site, searchable by subject, university or instructor. Why not have a look to see what they have in your area of study or work? At least it's not hard to sneak out of the lecture halfway through...

Even more to Muse over...

Project MUSE is expanding its online archives of over 80 journals titles. Over half of the titles involved will have their complete archive available and the increased content is being made available at no additional cost.

Some of the titles already expanded to the level of a complete archive are:

• Children's Literature (1972-)
  
• Children's Literature Association Quarterly(1976-)
  
• The Emily Dickinson Journal (1992-)
  
• The Henry James Review (1979-)
• Journal of Early Christian Studies (1993-)
• Journal of Women's History (1989-)
• Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology (1994-)
  

Other titles currently being expanded include:

• a/b: Autobiography Studies
• Civil War History
• Eighteenth Century Fiction
• Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies
• Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
• Journal of Narrative Theory
• Nabokov Studies
• Nineteenth Century French Studies
• Philip Roth Studies
• Philosophy and Literature
• Philosophy of Music Education Review
• Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture

You can browse Project Muse's complete journals collection here. If you are accessing the resource from off-campus you should link to it via the databases page on the Library website.

Project Muse is available to us through the IReL initiative.

Philosophers' Imprint

"Edited by philosophers
Published by librarians"

Philosophers' Imprint is an open access resource from University of Michigan Library that may be of interest to our students and staff in Human Development, or anyone with a passing interest in philosophy.

It is an online collection of original papers in philosophy published on the web with no subscription or licence requirement. Articles are refereed and selected for publication on the basis of their "estimated long-term significance". At present there are about sixty articles on subjects such as The Nature of Noise (Kulvicki, J.), How Actions Govern Intention (Shah, N.) and Nietzsche's Theory of the Will (Leiter, B.).

Items are added at irregular intervals, though for the last few years they have been pretty much monthly and there is a mailing list if you want to be notified when a new article is posted.