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Tools and Links for getting the most out of this site.
The Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker bookmarklet
The Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker bookmarklet is a tool for integrating Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker into your everyday browsing and searching of Google Books and the Internet Archive. Although both those sites offer bibliographical information about the texts they display, that information isn’t always complete, and it’s not always accurate. You can use the bookmarklet to query Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker in search of better information about the text you’ve found.
While viewing a volume at Google Books or the Internet Archive, click on the Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker bookmarklet to open Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker in a new browser window. If the volume you’re viewing has been identified in the site’s database, you’ll get a quick positive identification with accurate information about the edition you’re looking at. If you’d like, you can then go right to the entry for that edition at Eighteenth-Century Book tracker—it’s an especially handy way of getting quick access to other volumes of multi-volume works.
Of course, not every volume you’ll find at Google Books or the Internet Archive will have been added to this site’s database. (We’re running, um, just a few million volumes behind at the moment, but are determined to catch up—and you can help!) If the site doesn’t have any information about the volume you’ve found, you’ll get an option to add the volume to the site’s database, which you can do in as little as two clicks: the bookmarklet pulls in metadata from the record you were viewing, and uses that metadata to pre-populate a link submission form. If you like, you can add a bit more information about the volume, including: a volume number and title (where needed), the name of the holding library at which the volume was scanned, the volume’s shelfmark, and any relevant copy notes (“Extensive MS annotations,” “Page 17 is illegible,” etc.). Scroll down to the bottom of the form, click “Save,” and you're done. If you don’t have time or inclination to add that extra information, you can submit the link with just the metadata gathered by the bookmarklet.
Registered users of the site can also use the bookmarklet to create new bibliographical records based on entries at the English Short Title Catalogue. If you’ve used the ESTC to identify a text, but find that there isn’t yet a bibliographical record for that edition in the site’s database, you can click on the Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker bookmarklet to create a new record—the bookmarklet will detect whether the ESTC record was for a book or a periodical, and will create the correct type of entry. You can then match the copy record for the volume you were examining to the newly-created bibliographical record.
To start using the Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker bookmarklet, just drag this link: C18 BookTracker to the bookmarks bar in your web browser. This bookmarklet has been tested in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome for Mac OS X, and should definitely work in the same browsers for Windows. You may need to turn off pop-up blocking in some browsers for the bookmarklet to work properly. I'm doing my best to add support for Internet Explorer, and hope to have that sorted out before too long. In the mean time, Windows users might want to try out Firefox or Chrome.
Note that the bookmarklet is designed to add links only from Google Books and the Internet Archive. If it fails to work with a book from either of those sites, please contact me, including a link to the page you were viewing when the bookmarklet failed: there may be some strange edge cases that I haven’t encountered yet. I’m open to extending the bookmarklet’s functionality as time and my meager javascript skills permit. If you know of another site that offers lots of eighteenth-century texts, and you’d like to use the Eighteenth-Century Book Tracker bookmarklet with that site, please let me know using the site’s contact form.
Links to other sites
If you're a registered user of the site and decide to try your hand at identifying links other people have submitted to the site, here are some sites to help you find the information you need:
Bibliographies and Union Catalogues
- The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)
- A bibliography and union catalogue of pre-1800 printed works from the English-speaking world. The ESTC number provides a unique bibliographical identifier for editions printed in Great Britain and the colonies, as well as English-language editions printed elsewhere in the period.
- The Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN)
- A “Dutch retrospective bibliography for the period 1540-1800.” The STCN provides a unique bibliographical identifier (a "fingerprint" for Dutch editions from the period.
- The Short Title Catalogus Vlaanderen
- “An online bibliography of books printed in 17th-century Flanders.” The STCV provides a unique bibliographical identifier for Flemish editions from this period.
- WorldCat (OCLC)
- WorldCat is a union catalogue provided by the Online Computer Library Center, a worldwide consortium of libraries working together on matters of collection cataloguing. This enterprise doesn’t provide the same level of bibliographical scrutiny that one finds at the ESTC, STCN, or STCV. While WorldCat aggregates libraries’ holdings information and attempts to consolidate instances of the same edition into a master record, the heterogeneity of the partner libraries’ cataloguing systems means that duplicate entries are inevitable. Still, for books from periods not covered by the other bibliographies, and for books produced in regions not covered by those bibliographies, the OCLC number provides at least some way to identify an edition.
Library Catalogues
The following is a partial list of libraries that have partnered with Google Books and the Internet Archive. Each link will take you to that library’s online catalogue, which can come in handy for ascertaining shelfmarks (call numbers) for scanned volumes.
- Bayerische Staatsbibliothek - München
- Biblioteca de Catalunya
- Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire - Lausanne
- Boston Public Library
- Columbia University
- Gettysburg College
- Harvard University [Multiple libraries]
- Indiana University [Authenticate as "Guest"]
- New York Public Library
- Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
- Oxford University, OLIS [Multiple libraries—less user friendly, but more exhaustive]
- Oxford University, SOLO [Multiple libraries—more user-friendly, but may not retrieve all results as reliably as OLIS]
- Princeton University [Multiple libraries]
- Queen's University [Kingston, Ontario]
- Stanford University
- Universidad Complutense de Madrid
- Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent
- University of California system - MELVYL
- University of Michigan
- University of Minnesota
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Toronto
- University of Wisconsin-Madison