Free access to the English Short Title Catalogue

‘A matchless resource’, said Professor David McKitterick of Cambridge University about the new web-access English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). The catalogue lists all books – some 500,000 – printed in the British Isles, and in English anywhere in the world, up to 1800. It also lists the locations of known copies in 2,000 libraries, archives and collections worldwide.

Neil Wilson and Moira Goff (above) managed the complex task of mounting the database on the Library’s website. Moira says, ‘ESTC has been a costly subscription service for two decades. Now
we’ve created a free web service, opening up this “matchless resource” to researchers and an increasingly wide public interest.‘