A significant part of what the University Libraries purchase or lease consists of digital full-text databases. The collections in these databases contain a variety of primary source materials useful for teaching and research projects across the curriculum. They are significant in scope and breadth, and here we’d like to provide synopses for three of these collections. We encourage you to explore them and consider how they could be used by students and you in assignments, research papers, and other kinds of intellectual inquiries and presentations.
All of these databases are available on the SLU Libraries web site (off campus access is limited to members of the SLU Community).
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
Scope: 136,000 titles published between 1700-1800 in Great Britain and number of British Colonies, searchable, and the materials include books, essays, pamphlets, and broadsheets. The database incorporates those titles from the eighteenth century in the English Short Title Catalogue.
Specifically: This is a particularly significant database for research in British literary topics, European history, popular appraisals of theater and the arts, religious studies, and personal testaments to the prevailing attitudes and dogma of the day.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Scope: Tens of thousands of titles published between 1790-1929 are collected into four digital archives—Asia and the West, British Politics and Society, British Theatre, Music and Literature: High and Popular Culture, and European Literature 1790-1840: the Corvey Collection.
Specifically: This database would be a great help for major primary source research projects in European Studies, History, English, Theater, Performance and Communication Arts, Government, Modern Languages, and Art. This collection contains not only texts from the nineteenth century, but the critical response of the day.
Women Writer’s Project
Scope: This is actually one of our longest standing digital collections, a collection of 320 works by women authors first published between 1526 and 1850. This is database facilitates both browsing and searching, and represents a useful collection for exploring the issues pre-Victorian women writers engaged, and faced.
Specifically: This is collection encompasses a range of titles from literary works to the sciences to satires on manners. Like Nineteenth Century Collections Online this would be a useful resource for projects on the history of science, as a number of scientific treatises are included within this collection.