• Home
• Find Out More

Reviews & Testimonials

Reviews:

"...breadth of coverage and great utility for specialized research on many subjects. Recommended."

– Choice, April 2005

"The ECCO interface is certainly not an 18th Century Artifact. Thomson Gale has used clean simple design that ensures that the scanned image a user is researching is placed at the center of the screen. The top of the screen features the essential data of author, title name, publisher, year of publication, the scan's page number and which index the page is from.

If your user base needs regular access to original 18th Century works this is the most comprehensive database available. With Athens authentication, this vast 18th Century library is sure to become a more embedded component of 21st Century research."

– Information World Review, February 2005

"ECCO provides excellent access to a broad range of materials in a wide array of disciplines, covering an important era in world history"

– Reference Reviews, August 2004

"This system performs well; you can literally browse by alphabet or type in the beginning of a name or title to pull up a suggested list.

The online Search Tips section is nothing short of superb. Best of all, it is constantly available at the top of every screen.

THE BOTTOM LINE: The content, scope, accessibility of Eighteenth Century Collections Online are astonishing. Enthusiastically recommended for all academic, public, a research libraries serving serious literary scholarship."

– Database and Disc Reviews, May 2004

"This database will be extremely useful in college and university libraries. Many of these writing are not made available to the public due to their scarcity and their delicate conditions. This database makes the literature of the eighteenth century available to students and scholars alike."

– ARBA, 2004

Testimonials:

"Today eighteenth century scholars have many print and electronic archives at their disposal, But ECCO is unquestionably the best. Compiled by the best research universities in North America and Britain, ECCO offers the largest archive of its kind, boasting more than a hundred thousand fully text searchable texts.

In this vast collection, scholars can research both ideas and images, getting an intimate look at eighteenth century Britain and the Americas. For instance, in an undergraduate or graduate class, students could examine Samuel Johnson's renowned pamphlet, The False Alarm, that attempted to defuse the volatile Wilkite crisis of the late 1760s and early 1770s, brought about by the expulsion of John Wilkes from parliament (Wilkes libeled King George III and wrote the bawdy An Essay on Woman, a parody of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man). Then the class could examine numerous illustrations of Wilkes, such as famous images of him entitled "Wilkes and liberty."

Whatever interests scholars and students bring to ECCO, they will find this huge electronic archive, with its sophisticated search engines, motivates new knowledge. Researchers following up footnotes to contemporary scholarship in print will find that new worlds of teaching and scholarship are opened up. Imagine being able to show students the complexities of Pope's The Dunciad, in its many editions, as well as the controversial responses to this text. Anthologized texts taught in the classroom, accompanied by ECCO, take on a hypertext quality, nearly impossible to find in ordinary anthologies sold by publishers. In short, with ECCO, the print world and the electronic world find a symbiotic relationship, yielding endless possibilities for teaching and scholarship."

– Dr. Mark A. Pedreira, University of Puerto Rico, March 2006

"...ECCO's most salient feature is that it is fully searchable, and that it offers various means of broadening or narrowing searches, of which level-of-fuzziness is most notable...as I have come to realize, that many LiOn searches fail to turn up words that are in fact present in texts that are in its database. Because ECCO uses microfilms rather than transcriptions, it has largely overcome this very serious problem...More scholars, it seems to me, will be seeking to investigate a topic in depth, within a period rather than across periods, and for this ECCO is invaluable...ECCO appears to be greatly superior to any searchable, electronic rival known to me...But I am confident that for more advanced research of various kinds, ECCO will be welcomed at once, widely and warmly, and that as its database expands and more and more scholars become aware of what can be done with it, it will establish itself as an indispensable tool...My best wishes to you--and for the success of this admirable project."

– Professor George Starr (UCSB), April 2004