For more than two decades, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) has been the backbone of digital scholarship in the eighteenth century. It remains one of the most frequently cited and widely adopted archives in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, contributing to both faculty research and the development of interdisciplinary scholarship at academic institutions worldwide.
The platform’s impact reflects the thoughtful curation and collaboration behind its design. Gale created ECCO through partnerships with leading libraries, guided by the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a comprehensive bibliographic repository of fifteenth- through eighteenth-century print, aggregated from more than 2,000 contributing institutions.
In 2026, Gale will launch ECCO Part III, an ambitious expansion that adds approximately 25,000 newly digitized titles, many of which were inaccessible in previous efforts due to microfilm limitations or collection gaps. The new materials include works that had circulated outside major metropolitan centers or existed only in dispersed holdings, making them difficult to consolidate until now. This release broadens the records available to researchers and invites a reassessment of long-established narratives in eighteenth-century studies.
As we look forward to the launch of ECCO Part III in 2026, let’s first take a global view of ECCO Part I and II before we then explore what’s on the horizon.
ECCO: A Digital Archive Built for Research at Scale
With unparalleled reach, ECCO supports inquiry at scale. Its scope includes all known titles published in Great Britain and its territories and colonies during the eighteenth century.
Since its launch, it has grown to include more than 180,000 titles and more than 32 million pages of primary source material. Researchers can work across a vast corpus of printed works—novels, sermons, legal records, scientific manuals, theatrical prints, travel literature, and more—preserved with full bibliographic fidelity, navigable through a suite of advanced research tools.
The platform privileges user experience as much as scale. Its search functionality allows users to narrow results by document type, author gender, country of publication, subject-based modules, and archive part (i.e., I, II, and III). ECCO also preserves original pagination for simplified and accurate citation and makes documents available in both image and OCR formats, with high-accuracy text recognition for reliable keyword search and data extraction.
Because it’s available on the Gale Primary Sources platform, ECCO benefits from advanced tools built directly into the research workflow. Features like Term Frequency and Topic Finder support exploratory analysis, which is particularly helpful when paired with the ability to cross-search with other Gale collections. Additionally, users can conduct full-text data export for large-scale text and data mining through Gale Digital Scholar Lab—a platform specifically designed for digital humanities work.
To support instruction and research needs, ECCO offers a dedicated Learning Center that helps users understand how to make the most of the platform, including curated essays on research themes. Academic librarians will also find that the platform integrates seamlessly with existing library systems, thanks to MARC records and Portico preservation.
ECCO preserves the past while expanding what’s possible in archival teaching and research.
“ECCO has been invaluable to my research on eighteenth-century literature and culture . . . Completing my recent publications would have been much more difficult without ECCO.”
–Dr. Elizabeth Bohls, Professor of English, University of Oregon
Eighteenth Century Collections Online: Parts I and II
At launch in 2003, ECCO Part I provided scholars with their first significant opportunity to work across the eighteenth century on a truly expansive scale. With more than 135,000 titles—most from the British Library’s microfilm archive—it created an unprecedented digital repository of the period’s published record. Scholars could move quickly between a wealth of materials, much of which was previously limited to in-person access.
Six years later, ECCO Part II expanded that foundation with nearly 50,000 additional titles and more than seven million pages of new content. Sourced from the holdings of the British Library, Bodleian Library, University of Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland, and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, ECCO Part II placed new emphasis on literature, religion, and the social sciences. This second installment extended ECCO’s geographic and disciplinary range, surfacing works that had previously been difficult to access due to archival dispersion or format limitations.
ECCO III: Exploring New Research Pathways
ECCO Part III continues the work of its predecessors by expanding their scope through a systematic review of the ESTC, which is constantly growing. Many of these titles had never been microfilmed or were recent additions to the catalog, making them inaccessible during the development of Part I and II.
This installment adds approximately 25,000 newly digitized titles sourced from six major libraries across Britain and Europe: the British Library, University College London, the National Library of Scotland, Senate House Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and King’s College London.
The result is a larger and more representative archive that helps correct structural absences in earlier iterations, including the underrepresentation of works printed outside London, materials from British colonies and territories, publications by lesser-known printers, and texts that fell outside canonical genres. By recovering these rare texts, ECCO III gives scholars an opportunity to revisit established research pathways and expand into new ones.
“To have or not to have ECCO is an existential question for any serious student, researcher, or teacher of the eighteenth century. The database provides access, at the click of a mouse, to the holdings of the very best research libraries in the world.”
–Professor Lukas Erne, Director, English Department, University of Geneva
Preserving Texts of Marginalized Geographies and Linguistics
ECCO III brings greater bibliographic depth to the archive by recovering texts that were historically excluded from large-scale digitization—often because they existed only in dispersed or lesser-known collections or fell outside the collecting priorities of major institutions at the time.
Among these recovered works are publications from British colonies and territories where local print cultures operated at the edge of empire, with India, Jamaica, and the colonial United States being the most frequently mentioned outside of Great Britain and Ireland, with additional materials from Australia. Beyond the bounds of empire, other locations referenced in the archives include France, Germany, Japan, Martinique, and Poland.
Other additions reflect the multilingual complexity of the period. While the majority of titles are in English, the collection includes a significant number in French and Latin, as well as smaller sets in German, Greek, and other languages. Materials produced in multiple languages or for the purpose of translation reveal the practical and cultural demands of a growing empire, with a glossary of Bengal revenue terms, dictionaries of Hindvi and Mohammedan law, and multilingual religious tracts among them.
Without access to these texts, research often centered on what was preserved in metropolitan collections or captured on microfilm, reinforcing a narrower view of eighteenth-century print culture than the historical record actually supports.
In this way, ECCO III extends the archive both geographically and linguistically, supporting work in global history, postcolonial studies, translation studies, and Indigenous historiography—domains where source material has often been difficult to access or verify.
→ Want to see ECCO III in action? Check out our interactive exhibit “Bursting the Bubble.”
New Materials, New Formats, New Research Possibilities
ECCO III is the first part of the collection to be digitized in full color directly from the original volumes rather than from microfilm. That alone opens new pathways for material culture and visual studies. Scholars now have access to the complete visual form of each document—bindings, covers, spines, illustrated title pages, and marginalia—offering a richer context for the study of print as artifact.
The collection also includes a significant body of single-sheet items, particularly broadsides, many of which circulated outside elite publishing channels. These documents capture street-level political messaging, public notices, illustrated satire, and performative texts—materials that help scholars reconstruct public discourse beyond what is preserved in bound volumes.
Together, these formats deepen the archive’s capacity to support research in book history, visual culture, public rhetoric, and the history of reading. They also open new teaching opportunities, particularly in courses focused on publishing, literacy, and the aesthetics of historical print.
“ECCO III will be the most exciting thing that’s happened in eighteenth-century studies in the last 20 years.”
–Lindsay Whitaker-Guest, Associate Editor, Gale
Why ECCO III Matters Now
The release of ECCO III arrives at a moment when scholars are looking beyond what is contained within the historical record, and asking how they came to be, who shaped them—and what they excluded.
In eighteenth-century studies, that means confronting how the printed record was shaped by colonial extraction, commercial bias, censorship, and institutional collection practices. By surfacing under-digitized materials (e.g., texts from the edges of empire, works in translation, regionally printed publications, and specialized instructional works), ECCO III provides researchers with a broader evidentiary base from which to ask more nuanced questions.
ECCO III cannot and does not intend to rectify the asymmetries of the historical print records that it helps preserve. Instead, it offers new ways to understand and interrogate these records—and what is absent from them—by making them more legible, searchable, and answerable to the questions of contemporary scholars.
Give your campus access to the most comprehensive digital archive of eighteenth-century print culture with ECCO III. Contact your Gale sales representative to learn more about pricing and product demos—and to be among the first to get updates as the 2026 launch approaches.
Not yet subscribed? Request a trial of ECCO to discover how this unparalleled collection supports interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching across the eighteenth century.