Teaching Book History in Special Collections

The Atlas of Early Printing allows users to examine the geographical spread of printing in the fifteenth century with a variety of filters to highlight different aspects of the map.

The English Short-Title Catalog (ESTC) is a vast database designed to include a bibliographic record, with holdings, of every surviving copy of letterpress produced in Great Britain or any of its dependencies, in any language, worldwide, from 1473-1800. In order to increase access to these items, we include references to microfilm, digital, and other facsimile versions. All of our records are fully searchable online.

The ISTC database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates. 30,518 editions are listed as of August 2016, including some 16th-century items previously assigned incorrectly to the 15th century.

The USTC is a database covering European printing from 1455 to 1650, including full coverage of the first two centuries of print in all our searches and analysis.

RBMS maintains a list of Latin place found in the imprints of books printed before 1801 and their vernacular equivalents in RDA (Resource Description and Access) form.

Founded in 2008, HathiTrust is a not-for-profit collaborative of academic and research libraries preserving 17+ million digitized items. HathiTrust offers reading access to the fullest extent allowable by U.S. copyright law, computational access to the entire corpus for scholarly research, and other emerging services based on the combined collection. HathiTrust members steward the collection — the largest set of digitized books managed by academic and research libraries — under the aims of scholarly, not corporate, interests.