Database Deepdive: Early English Books Online Trial

Early English Books Online (EEBO) is a database of digitised copies of printed texts from before 1700. It is an invaluable resource for anyone looking at the Early Modern period, a period of great upheaval and change that has shaped our world in so many ways. This post explores this content on the ProQuest platform that is currently available as a trial via the library.

ProQuest currently have 147,000+ titles on EEBO (20,000 titles more than the static version of EEBO we currently access through JISC historical texts) and that number is ever increasing as annually Proquest add more digital copies to the platform. Of those titles, around 60,000 of them come with transcriptions as part of the Text Creation Partnership Project – meaning that the text is searchable and more compatible with accessible technologies such as text-to-voice.

The variety of texts included is expansive, including examples of every genre and form of text from the early modern era: plays, pamphlets, tracts, broadsides, religious books, newspapers and their predecessors the news book, music sheets, maps, almanacs, and so much more.

What makes this trial especially fun is the many features provided by Proquest that make searching the database easy and allowing you to add many filters and tweaks to your searches. The advanced search helps optimize your search in whatever way best suits you.

Go to Advanced Search for options for spelling variants and forms variants – particularly useful for searching Early Modern Texts from the centuries before Johnson’s dictionary was produced for the English Language. Shakespeare infamously spelt his name a multitude of different ways and by ticking the box to allow spelling variants your search for Shakespeare will also turn up texts with ‘Shakespear’, ‘Shakespeares’, ‘Shakspere’ and more. Form variants mean that searching for ‘war’ will return ‘wars’, ‘warred’, and ‘warring’, and combining the two options will return both spelling and form combinations. An excellent way to ensure that texts don’t slip through the cracks due to the non-uniformity of English spelling in the past.

A whole world of texts is easily discoverable through all these options to filter by which ever means is most relevant.

Additional settings include filters;

• by language (are you looking at Latin texts or the vernacular English?)
• by document type (books or periodicals?)
• by particular features (are you looking for maps? Woodcuts? Handwritten notes?).

As common with many databases you can narrow your results by dates, authors, titles etc.

You can also look up established subject headings including those from the Universal Short Title Catalogue – a system developed to catalogue historical texts across Europe consistently. For example a recently added subject heading is ‘Women in publishing’ where you can now browse the nearly 5000 texts on EEBO that revolve around women, for example if you’re looking for works by playwright Aphra Behn, for Leveller publications by radical printer Jane Coe, or just texts discussing the women’s matters such as “The Poor-Whores Petition”. 

A significant benefit of EEBO via ProQuest is  the ability to interface with other Proquest databases at the same time.  As we also have a subscription to Early European Books (EEB), this has opened up Early Modern Books interface for all our users, where both collections can be search simultaneously. EEB covers the same time period as EEBO from 1450-1700, and includes 71,000+ texts from 5 major European libraries, which are also classified with the same USTC subject headings as EEBO.

It is a fantastic resource to search alongside EEBO, particularly given the permeability of Early Modern Publishing. To return to an example from above – you can use the filter of ‘Women in publishing’ to compare how many women were openly publishing in England verses the continent.

Furthermore, the ability to interface with other Proquest databases is not limited to EEB. For example, if you’re studying news and journalism over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, you can tick boxes to search both EEBO and the British Periodicals collections to pick up results from both early newsbooks from the 1600s collected in the Thomason Tracts and results from newspapers as they began to develop into a more familiar format throughout the 1700s.

A whole world of potential in historical and literary research at your fingertips.

For further information or need help using our resources please email LISLiaison@wlv.ac.uk or see our Skills Page