Arts and Humanities electronic databases - subject index: D-E

The electronic resources listed here are available in the Humanities and Rare Books and Music Reading Rooms (and in some cases also in other Reading Rooms) of the British Library.

For licensing reasons, the links to most of the electronic databases listed below will only work from within British Library Reading Rooms.

If you do not find the resource you are looking for, see the Library's complete listing of electronic resources in the British Library London Reading Rooms.

Online resources

CD-ROMs

American studies	History
Anthropology and ethnography	Islamic studies
Architecture	Italian studies
Archives	Jewish studies
Art and Design	Language and linguistics
Australian studies	Librarianship and information science
Belgian studies	Music and recorded sound
Biography	National bibliographies / Books in print
Catalogues and general bibliographies	New Zealand studies
Church history and theology	Performing arts
Classical studies	Periodical indexes
Dictionaries	Philosophy
Dissertations and research	Psychology
Dutch studies	Rare books
Encyclopaedias	Religious studies
English literature	Scandinavian studies
Film	Short title catalogues
French studies	Slavonic and East European studies
Full text databases	Social sciences
German studies	Women's studies
Hispanic studies	Other electronic resources

Dictionaries

Title	Brief description	Format
Anglo-Norman dictionary	Revision of the Anglo-Norman dictionary, first published between 1977 and 1992.
Credo Reference	Credo Reference is an online reference library that provides access to a large number of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books. Subjects covered include art, biography, history, literature, music, religion, and science and technology.
Dictionary of Old English / Old English Corpus	A complete record of surviving Old English except for some variant manuscripts of individual texts. There are 3037 texts in the corpus.
Middle English Compendium	Designed to offer easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.
Oxford English Dictionary	Online version of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Oxford Reference Online (Premium Collection)	Over 100 specialist and general reference dictionaries covering a wide range of subjects from social sciences, business, sciences, language, the arts, and history.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary	1993 edition of Webster's, containing over 450,000 vocabulary entries.

Dissertations and research

Title	Brief description	Format
Dissertations & Theses	Index of doctoral dissertations and master's theses from around the world. A large number of the titles are available in full-text. Dissertations published from July 1980 onwards include 350-word abstracts written by the author. Master's theses published from 1988 onwards include 150-word abstracts. Period covered: 1637 to date.
Index to Theses	This database covers theses accepted by universities in Great Britain and Ireland from 1716 onwards, with abstracts from 1970. The full-text of many of the theses included may be consulted via EThOS (Electronic Theses Online Service).
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses	Index of doctoral dissertations and master's theses from around the world. A large number of the titles are available in full-text. Dissertations published from July 1980 onwards include 350-word abstracts written by the author. Master's theses published from 1988 onwards include 150-word abstracts. Period covered: 1637 to date.

Dutch Studies

Title	Brief description	Format
Brinkman's Cumulative Catalogue	Information on the books, journals, electronic publications and musical scores published in the Netherlands since 1981. Information on the titles recorded originates from Koninklijke Bibliotheek, which functions as the official national bibliographic centre of the Netherlands. Available only on the stand-alone PC for non-networked CD-ROMs, at the rear of the Reference Enquiry Desk in Humanities - Floor 2.

Encyclopaedias

Title	Brief description	Format
Credo Reference	Credo Reference is an online reference library that provides access to a large number of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books. Subjects covered include art, biography, history, literature, music, religion, and science and technology.
Encyclopaedia Britannica	EB Online includes the complete encyclopedia, as well as Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, the Britannica Book of the Year and an Internet directory that includes more than 130,000 links to selected Web sites.
Encyclopedie de Diderot et d'Alembert	A complete online version including the 11 volumes of plates of the first edition of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie developed by the Institut national de la langue francaise and the ARTFL Project, University of Chicago.
Oxford Reference Online (Premium Collection)	Over 100 specialist and general reference dictionaries covering a wide range of subjects from social sciences, business, sciences, language, the arts, and history.

English literature

Title	Brief description	Format
20th Century African-American poetry	Database of modern and contemporary African-American poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. (In Literature Online)
20th Century American poetry	Poems drawn from 750 volumes of over 300 poets. (In Literature Online)
20th Century English poetry	Poems drawn from 594 volumes by 282 poets. (In Literature Online)
ABELL (Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature)	ABELL contains over 750,000 records covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world from 1920 onwards. (In Literature Online)
African-American poetry (1750-1900)	Nearly 3000 poems written by African-American poets in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (In Literature Online)
American Drama	When complete, this collection will contain more than 2,000 plays by American dramatists that chronicle the history and culture of America through its dramatic writing. (In Literature Online)
American Poetry	Over 40,000 poems by more than 200 American poets from the Colonial Period to the early twentieth century. (An individual collection within Literature Online)
AustLit	AustLit indexes and describes Australian literature (from 1780 to the present) published in a range of print and electronic information sources. It includes biographical and bibliographical information, and also makes available selected critical articles and creative writing in full text.
Bibliography of American Literature	Detailed description of the works of America's most important literary writers from the time of the Revolution to 1930. More than 37,000 works are listed, essentially the complete printed record of American literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
British Literary Manuscripts Online: Medieval and Renaissance	An extensive digital archive of more than 375,000 manuscript pages, including complete facsimile copies of letters, stories, poems, plays and other literary material in Middle and Early Modern English, c.1120-1660.
British Literary Manuscripts Online c. 1660-1900	An extensive digital archive, comprising more than 400,000 manuscript pages; includes complete facsimile copies of poems, plays, essays, novels, diaries, journals, correspondence and other manuscripts from the Restoration through the Victorian era.
Canadian Poetry	Full text of more than 12,000 poems by 142 poets. (Online within Literature Online)
Contemporary Authors	Gives biographical details for over 100,000 modern writers. Writers covered include: novelists, poets, playwrights, non-fiction writers, journalists, scriptwriters. Also some photojournalists, syndicated cartoonists, and graphic novelists. Writers in languages other than English are also covered provided that their works have been published in the U.S. or translated into English. (Online within Literature Resource Center)
Contemporary Literary Criticism Select	Selected criticism from the print series. (Online within Literature Resource Center)
Credo Reference	Credo Reference is an online reference library that provides access to a large number of encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauri and other reference books. Subjects covered include art, biography, history, literature, music, religion, and science and technology.
Dictionary of Old English / Old English Corpus	A complete record of surviving Old English except for some variant manuscripts of individual texts. There are 3037 texts in the corpus.
Early American Fiction 1789 - 1850 [-1875]	Provides both images and text for a well-defined and comprehensive collection of early American fiction. Includes full text of works by James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Catharine Sedgwick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Herman Melville and many others. Published jointly with the University of Virginia Library. (In Literature Online)
Early English Prose Fiction	Over 200 complete works in fictional prose from the period 1500-1700. (In Literature Online)
Eighteenth Century Fiction	96 complete works in English prose by writers from the British Isles. Includes Sterne's Tristram Shandy, and two different editions of Richardson's Clarissa and Pamela and of Swift's Gulliver's Travels. (An individual collection within Literature Online)
English Drama	A combination of Chadwyck-Healey's English Verse Drama and English Prose Drama full-text databases. 4,000 plays by 1,200 authors from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth century. (In Literature Online)
English Poetry Complete	Essentially the complete English poetic canon from 600 to 1900. Over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources, together with contextual notes and bibliographical references. (An individual collection within Literature Online)
English Prose Drama	Part of Chadwyck-Healey's English Drama online. Contains prose works in English that were performed or intended for performance. Also contains masques, entertainments, and certain closet dramas. 1,653 plays included by 365 authors. There are 42 anonymous works.
English Verse Drama	Part of Chadwyck-Healey's English Drama online. Contains verse works acted on or intended for the stage, which are either wholly or predominantly in verse. Masques, entertainments, translations and adaptations are included, along with certain closet dramas omitted from The English Poetry Full Text Database. Comprises 585 plays written by 212 authors.
The Faber poetry library	A collection of some of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The Faber list spans the seventy-year history of this major publishing house, and includes the poetry of James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney. In total The Faber Poetry Library contains 140 volumes by 50 poets. (In Literature Online)
International Who's Who in Poetry	Details from this publication are included in World Who's Who.
International Who's Who of Authors and Writers	Details from this publication, which contains biographical information on the key personalities of the literary world, are included in World Who's Who.
Literature online	A fully searchable library of more than 200,000 works of English and American poetry, drama and prose, plus biographies, bibliographies, secondary sources and web links.
Literature resource center	Provides access to biographies, bibliographies and critical analysis of authors from every age and literary discipline. It covers more than 90,000 novelists, poets, essayists, journalists and other writers, with in-depth coverage of 2,000 of the most-studied authors.
Major Authors	Major authors on CD-ROM: The Brontes, Johnson and Boswell, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf.
Middle English Compendium	Designed to offer easy access to and interconnectivity between three major Middle English electronic resources: an electronic version of the Middle English Dictionary, a HyperBibliography of Middle English prose and verse, based on the MED bibliographies, a Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, as well as links to an associated network of electronic resources.
MLA International Bibliography	MLA provides bibliographic information on published scholarly documents in a range of subjects including literature, modern languages, linguistics, folklore. 1926-.
Nineteenth Century Fiction	250 novels from the period 1782 to 1903, including works by all the major Victorian novelists such as Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, Eliot and Hardy, as well as the landmarks of Gothic and other fiction from the Romantic period. (In Literature Online)
Orlando : Women's Writing in the British isles from the Beginnings to the Present	Electronic textbase on the history of women's writing, primarily focused upon the British Isles, with biographical entries, from 8th century AD to the present.
Oxford Reference Online (Premium Collection)	Over 100 specialist and general reference dictionaries covering a wide range of subjects. Includes Oxford companions to American literature, English literature and Shakespeare.
Past Masters	Full text electronic database covering philosophy, the history of political thought and theory, education, literature, religious studies, economics, classics, history and German studies. Includes complete works of Spencer, Chesterton and Jane Austen, and the letters of Charlotte Bronte, Coleridge, Dickens, Hardy, Pope, Katherine Mansfield, Shelley, Swift, Synge, Tennyson and Wordsworth.
Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700	This resource is produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University. “Perdita” means “lost woman” and the quest of the Perdita Project has been to find early modern women authors who were “lost” because their writing exists only in manuscript form. The manuscripts in this site were written or compiled by women in the British Isles during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and they have been sourced from archives and libraries across the United Kingdom and the USA.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period	Includes some 60 volumes from 47 poets, together with critical and biographical essays.
Shakespeare (Editions and adaptations)	Contains: 11 major editions from the First Folio of 1623 to the Cambridge edition of 1863-6; 28 separate contemporary printings of individual plays and poems; selected apocrypha and related works. Also contains more than 100 adaptations, sequels, burlesques etc. from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
South and Southeast Asian Literature	Searchable collection of fiction and poetry written in English by authors from South and Southeast Asia, focusing on works composed during the late-colonial and postcolonial eras.
Underground & Independent Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels	A scholarly online collection for researchers of adult comic books and graphic novels. Beginning with the first underground comix from the 1960s to the work of modern sequential artists to the present day, content is supplemented by interviews, criticism, and journal articles. Note: contains graphic material that some may find offensive.
World Shakespeare Bibliography Online	Annotated entries for books, articles, book reviews, dissertations, theatrical productions, reviews of productions, audiovisual materials, electronic media, and other scholarly and popular materials related to Shakespeare and published or produced from 1962 onwards.