Digital Collections

These broad collections are major repositories providing digital primary source content from the 18th century.

British

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
Project which aims to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800.  Electronic text has been converted from image using OCR.  The text files are used solely for searching the product and the user is only able to view the digital image of the page.

ECCO-TCP (Text Creation Partnership)
Project to transcribe and encode the page images of books from ProQuest’s Early English Books Online, Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints.
About ECCO-TCP
 

18thConnect
18thConnect is an aggregator of digital resources that provide a comprehensive research environment for scholars working on the literature, history, the fine arts, and philosophy of the long eighteenth century (1660-1800). Transcribes and offers plain-text searching to open access and proprietary and digital archives including EEBO and ECCO.

Connectedhistories
Connected Histories brings together a range of digital resources related to early modern and nineteenth century Britain with a single federated search that allows sophisticated searching of names, places and dates, as well as the ability to save, connect and share resources within a personal workspace. We have produced this short video guide to introduce you to the key features.

American

Early American Imprints. Evans (1639-1800): Series 1
Full-text and full-page-image access to books, pamphlets and broadsides printed in America from 1639-1800.

Early Americas Digital Archive
The Early Americas Digital Archive (EADA) is a collection of electronic texts and links to texts originally written in or about the Americas from 1492 to approximately 1820.

Colonial and State Records of North Carolina
From the Documenting the American South collection at UNC-CH, this includes documents and materials from throughout the country and from several European repositories covering the earliest days of North Carolina's settlement by Europeans through the ratification of the United States Constitution.

Colonial Williamsburg Digital History Center
Digital initiatives for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation’s Research Division use innovative technologies to engage the public in the continuing conversation about the American Revolution, citizenship, and democracy, employing technologies such as  GIS, Virtual Reality, and XML, to create digital resources for studying and analyzing 18th-century America, with a focus on Williamsburg.

American Memory
Library of Congress collections

Atlantic and Pacific

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database
Information on more than 35,000 slave voyages that forcibly embarked over 12 million Africans for transport to the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Digital Archives and Pacific Cultures
Project to investigate the voyage narratives of eighteenth-century European expeditions to the Pacific, together with the English poetry and print media that responded to newly available accounts of first contact with Polynesian cultures. Makes available early and rare texts on Pacific encounters openly available for study, together with graphical visualizations and experiments with digital text analysis. A special emphasis is placed on mapping for this project, since Cook's voyages tested new methods for calculating longitude, and Cook's maps altered people's imagined view of "the globe." Charts the geographical coordinates recorded during these voyages, with a long-range goal to consider how closely the recorded coordinates coincide with geospatial references in our day. Required installation of Google Earth plugin.

Worldwide

HATHITRUST Digital Library
Partnership of academic and research institutions, offering a collection of millions of titles digitized fronm libraris around the world. The HathiTrust Research Center helps researchers meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text.

Advanced Google Book Search
Source of digitized books - this search interface allows you you limit by publication date.