Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a digital collection consisting of all 18th century publications of the British Empire.[1][2] Although a commercial publication of Thomson-Gale,[3] subsets of the database are freely available. It is widely held by libraries.[4] The collection contains over 200,000 volumes.[5]
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So far 2,231 texts have been released free to the public[6] through the work of the University of Michigan’s Text Creation Partnership. Rather than OCR, they rekey the texts[7] and tag them with TEI.[8] Their aim is to enable improved access to a fraction of the collection: they are making SGML/XML text editions for 10,000 books.[9] In addition to the free version, subscription access is also offered.[10]
Text analytic tools are available on this subset through the Text Analysis Portal for Research project.[11]
Oxford has converted some TEI files into free open access EPUB files.[12]
Cross-search is also available from ProQuest for those who subscribe to both Early English Books Online and ECCO.[13]
It was first introduced in 2003.[14][15] It was developed from microfilm copies.[16][17]
It is mainly, but not entirely in the English language.[18]