“Eighteenth-Century Libraries Online is the result of a five-year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project investigating the contribution of books to social, cultural and political change in North America and the British Isles during the eighteenth century.”
“This project uses cutting-edge digital techniques to capture, interpret and make freely available online surviving documentary evidence relating to the books acquired and circulated by more than 80 libraries on either side of the Atlantic. These were founded by a huge range of communities, from tiny rural settlements like Wigtown in the south-west corner of Scotland and Fredericktown on the Pennsylvanian frontier, to rapidly growing industrial centres like Belfast and Leeds, and bustling transatlantic ports like New York, Dublin, Bristol and Liverpool. By providing unprecedented access to this data, our primary aim was to help scholars and the wider public to think in new ways about the circulation, dissemination, reception and impact of new books – and the ideas they carried – in a crucial period marked by Enlightenment, Revolutions, global encounters and technological change. You can access the results of this research by accessing the database. If you are new to this site, you may find it useful to browse the tutorial videos.” –From the About page.
Find out more on the project home page or start searching now at: https://heurist.huma-num.fr/heurist/?db=Libraries_Readers_Culture_18C_Atlantic&website=39&pageid=72082
With this wonderful new tool, someone needs to revise Jesse Shera’s Foundations book, now 75 years old. Wayne Wiegand