Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains over 22 million digital page images of virtually every work printed in the English language, as well as works printed in Great Britain and its dependencies  from 1473-1700, in any language. This database presents classic early English works as they appear in their original format. View the first edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Vesalius’ early works with illustrations on human anatomy, or Purcell’s musical scores. Currently 128,000 texts are included and provide works related to all subject areas. EEBO is cross-searchable with Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

ECCO includes over 180,000 titles (200,000 volumes) comprising books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides and more. It is based on the English Short Title Catalogue of works published in the UK during the 18th Century plus thousands from elsewhere. ECCO I and II are parts of the same collection.  ECCO II includes recently discovered 18th Century material, some of which was not included in the English Short Title Catalogue on which ECCO I is based.

Browse and search tips

browse

• authors- an alphabetical list of authors and their works
• Thomason Tracts- pamphlets, books, broadsides and manuscripts published during the English Civil War (1640-1661)
• periodicals- newspapers (395) published during the English Civil War (1640-1661)

search

• basic- includes simple field boxes such as: keyword, title and author
• advanced- includes advanced fields such as language, illustration and source library
• periodicals- limits searching to 395 newspapers published during the English Civil War (1640-1661)
• bibliographic number- searches for the alphanumeric entry found in the short-title catalogues Pollard & Redgrave, Wing, or the Thomason Tracts
• reel position- search the reel number and position of the microfilm document
• illustration type- search documents containing one of 14 different illustration types (e.g. portrait, map, music) using the multi-select list
• limit by date- you can restrict a search for a document within a particular date range
• source library- search the library where the original document is held

Downloading images in EEBO

EEBO allows you to download images into pdf and tiff formats. Use pdf when you want to print an image and tiff when you want to manipulate an image in software like SnagIt.