Hi-Tech Short Title Catalogue

News of a bibliography of printed material published in English from the 15th century to 1800.

The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), an important new bibliography of printed material published in the British Isles or elsewhere in the world in the English language from the fifteenth century to 1800, has been published on CD-Rom, and is also available on-line. Originally planned to cover only the period 1701–1800, it now includes details of more than 390,000 items from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.

The ESTC is a unique source of data for almost anyone researching any aspect of the UK experience 1473–1800, whether literature, history, social history, military history, naval history, women’s history, theatre history, music history, architectural history – any area that has printed material associated with it. The ESTC allows researchers to find individual texts and locate copies of them, to find references to microfilm surrogates and other facsimiles, to discover the existence of texts on particular topics, to explore the printing and publishing history of particular texts, to look at the output of individual authors, etc.

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