By Mary Ann James, electronic resources manager, Marriott Library

The Marriott Library has purchased the third version of Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), just released by Gale Publishing in March 2026. This completes the ECCO database; ECCO I and II were purchased approximately 15 years ago by the library.

ECCO is a vast eighteenth-century library at your desktop—a fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles amounting to over 34 million fully-searchable pages. Gale releases ECCO Part III, with more than thirty thousand new works and approximately 1.7 million new pages. This includes more than six thousand broadsides and other single-page works.

ECCO is a digitization of the 18th-century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC). The ESTC project has been recording all works published or printed in Britain, Ireland, territories under British colonial rule and the United States. It also catalogs material printed elsewhere but contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories.

In terms of languages, the vast majority are in English with several thousand in French or Latin, smaller numbers in Ancient Greek, German, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Spanish and Welsh, and a few in other languages. The majority of the works were printed in England, Scotland, Ireland and the United States, among other countries from around the world.

In the collection you will find all eighteenth-century knowledge and discover eighteenth-century lives, as well as what they did, thought, said, hoped for, believed, and the events they lived through. There are government documents and writings by people of all professions and classes with the lower classes often found in legal documents or six-penny broadsheets such as Elizabeth Canning, a maidservant, who became one of the most famous English criminal mysteries of the eighteenth century.

The works themselves vary from multi-volume encyclopedia—so you can find out what was thought of as “knowledge” in the eighteenth century—to dictionaries, law books, histories, poetry, novels, and plays, biographies, works of science, philosophy, theology, religious books, tracts and sermons, royal, government or local proclamations, letters, journals and diaries, almanacks, acts of parliament, works on art, architecture, and auction catalogs, music, petitions, schoolbooks, to name a few.

Questions? Contact maryann.james@utah.edu