About this Site
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker provides a clearinghouse for students and scholars of the long eighteenth century to discover and share links to freely-available digital facsimiles of eighteenth-century texts.
Mission
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker provides a clearinghouse for students and scholars of the long eighteenth century to discover and share links to freely-available digital facsimiles of eighteenth-century texts. Over the last decade, a number of fantastic digital collections have appeared, making a wealth of eighteenth-century material available beyond the walls of the rare books rooms of elite research libraries. Those resources, though, are typically priced beyond the reach of smaller institutions, and generally aren’t available at all to individual subscribers. That means the possibilities for teaching and research that access to a rich archive of primary materials opens up have remained largely out of reach for people who aren’t affiliated with institutions that can afford expensive proprietary databases.
More recently, several large-scale digitization projects have begun to make a great deal of eighteenth-century material available at no cost. Unfortunately, these projects generally don’t handle their materials with the kind of bibliographical care that scholars rely on to do their work: distinctions among editions aren’t always apparent, for instance, and connections among the volumes in multi-volume works are frequently lost. So far, these resources have been less useful for serious scholarship than they could be.
This site aims to address both problems by enlisting interested scholars and students in the task of identifying eighteenth-century texts available freely online. Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker provides a central location for registering the links that its users find in the course of their scholarly work. By collecting and preserving these otherwise fugitive discoveries, the site will build a repository of eighteenth-century primary materials for use by teachers, students, and scholars everywhere. 
It was this thinking that inspired the site’s choice of logo, taken from the title page of an early number of The Gentleman’s Magazine (nearly all of which you'll find here, incidentally). Like that periodical, this site attempts to gather into one place a broad range of materials most of interest to its users: it selects the “flowers” of eighteenth-century material from the broader fields of the internet and presents them to users in a tidier bouquet than they’ll find elsewhere.
How the Site Works
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker is what one might call a meta-database: rather than providing any “content” of its own, the site offers a coherent interface for directing users to materials available elsewhere. The site doesn’t allow for full-text searching à la ECCO, but if you know that you'd like to see an eighteenth-century edition of, say, Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, you may well find a link to what you’re looking for here. Think of Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker as an under-construction library catalogue for the internet.
(If you want to discover eighteenth-century texts that use a particular word or phrase and don't have access to ECCO, you’re better off proceeding directly to Google Books. Given the challenges that eighteenth-century print presents to optical character recognition software, you might want to have a look at this screencast on tips for gaming the search system in order to turn up more results. The site’s administrator tries to be sure that the links to volumes at Google Books that are submitted to the database all get added to his own Google Books “Library.” You can search Ben’s library—in effect, a growing eighteenth-century subset of Google Books—here.)
The entries in the database are contributed by the site’s users. In the interests of accountability and quality assurance, you must become a registered user of the site to contribute links to the database. (Becoming a member is absolutely free, and is as simple as setting up an account, which you can do here.) Once you’ve registered and are signed in to the site, a link reading “Submit a Link” will appear in a menu on the left of your screen, from which you can enter information linking to facsimile texts you’ve found around the web. Links that are submitted are placed in a queue for review, but are then published as quickly as possible.
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker is free to use. Anyone can browse or search the database, and anyone can subscribe to the site’s RSS feeds to be notified when material matching their interests is added to the database (detailed tutorials on taking advantage of the site’s features are available here).
Editorial Principles
Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker aims, above all, to direct students and scholars to facsimiles of primary works relevant to the study of the eighteenth-century. We link only to materials that we believe to be legitimately available at no cost to all users.
Our preference is to link to materials that are available for users to download conveniently in .pdf format, rather than to materials that have to be read on screen, or that can only be downloaded with difficulty. On occasion, though, you may find links to other kinds of resources when they serve to provide access to material they couldn’t otherwise get. There are a number of links, for instance, to reproductions at The Thomas Gray Archive. While several of these can be downloaded in .pdf format, others can be read on screen; individual page images can be downloaded by right-clicking on the page image.
The site is open to indexing links to books in any language and on any subject, but the emphasis is on “books,” rather than “texts:” at this time, the site doesn’t link to digital editions of eighteenth-century texts, but rather to page-image reproductions of printed books. 
Generally speaking, we seek to link only to reproductions of books published before 1800, since one aim of the site is to facilitate inquiry into questions of print culture and book history for students and researchers who may not otherwise have access to original texts (or even their digital surrogates).
Because the aim is to as many eighteenth-century books as possible, the site doesn’t screen out duplicate copies of eighteenth-century editions, though the site's administrator consolidates duplicates into a single entry. (The administrator also works to ensure that each link appears in the database only once, of course—no point in linking to the same file five times.) Google Books, for instance, offers two copies of the second edition of Colley Cibber's An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber: both links are presented in the same entry so that those so inclined may compare copies, and those who just want to see a copy of Cibber's work aren’t perplexed by duplicate entries in the database. (Incidentally, one of those copies of Cibber’s Apology has fairly extensive marginalia, at least some of which seems to be contemporary to the text’s original publication.)
The site also links to reproductions of eighteenth-century primary texts that weren’t initially published until after 1800 (as, for example, The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay), as well as to reproductions of later editions of pre-1800 works when those editions are of interest in their own right (as, say, Sir Walter Scott’s edition of the novels of Daniel Defoe), or when they offer access to texts to which we are not otherwise able to direct users (as is the case for Ernest A. Baker’s 1905 edition of The Novels of Mrs. Aphra Behn). Obviously, volumes like that don’t figure directly in the study of eighteenth-century print culture or book history, but they do provide access to texts that might not otherwise be available. The database differentiates between pre- and post-1800 editions, however, so that users who seek only eighteenth-century editions can restrict their searches to the materials that interest them.