Any
high school worth its salt teaches students the immeasurable impact of
the eighteenth century. Counted among the events of those scant hundred
years are the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the
Industrial Revolution—but it has taken the Technological Revolution to
better bring an Age of Reason to the modern researcher.
In
1981, Gale began filming objects for a project commissioned by the
British Library called the English Short Title Catalog (ESTC). The ESTC
is a massive project that seeks to provide descriptions and pertinent
information on letterpress works created in Great Britain, any of its
dependencies, or in English anywhere else in the world between 1475 and
1700. Noting the importance of the work being done and the material
being filmed, Gale saw an opportunity for a product of its own and
decided to develop the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
The project was first conceptualized in the fall of 2002 and was
essentially developed within nine months. ECCO currently consists of
seven subject modules containing 150,000 works totaling approximately
33 million pages.
Why the eighteenth century? A number of
reasons, both practical and abstract, not the least of which being the
fact that Gale had the rights to use this particular collection of
content. In the eighteenth century, the end of strict printing
restrictions combined with the Industrial Revolution made the printed
word available to the masses like never before. This was also an era,
however, when print runs were exceedingly small, which means that very
few copies of some material remain in existence today. It is a body of
work that individuals have more limited access to except those
creations by more famous or prolific artists, writers, and scholars.
What
obscure material is available to researchers is often relegated to
microfilm or microfiche that have long been the bane of students and
researchers as they are difficult to manage, liable to break, and can
only be used by one person at a time. The print quality can also be
quite poor and difficult to read. The technology has long seemed
outdated and for good reason. Gale found libraries and librarians
poised to take academic research to the next level. "The digital world
is there in libraries," says Remmel Nunn, vice president and publisher
of Primary Source Microfilm, a Gale imprint, "librarians take this as
the next logical step."
In the Halls of Ivy
Although
a variety of libraries have already purchased ECCO, one of Gale's
marquee customers is Columbia University, which was the first to
purchase ECCO in its entirety. Columbia's more than 20 libraries
already contain in excess of eight million volumes, 5.2 million units
of microform, and 28 million manuscript items according to their Web
site, yet the university was impressed enough by ECCO to obtain the
entire collection. "I think of it as a service providing a new level of
accessibility for a large body of materials, much of which the library
had already acquired in microfilm format," says John Tofanelli,
Ango-American bibliographer for the Columbia University Libraries.
Gale
structured ECCO to be saleable in pieces or en masse, so the level of
implementation varies depending on the needs of an individual
institution. Florida Atlantic University has purchased the first module
and Florida State University has purchased the first two modules, while
Columbia has purchased them all. Each module is subject-specific and
has a rollout date in the next year or so. History and Geography was
the first module loaded and released, in June of 2003; Social Sciences
and Fine Arts and also Medicine, Science, and Technology followed with
a September 26, 2003 release; Literature and Language, which is the
largest module and comprises 28% of the total collection, is scheduled
for release December 12, 2003; and the other modules—Philosophy and
Religion; Law; and General Reference—will be released sometime in 2004.
When
a library purchases a module, they receive everything that has been
loaded in ECCO up to that point. The library will have perpetual access
to the information within the module, but will not automatically
receive objects or titles that may be added at a later date. Gale
expects to initiate future digital projects, but will make them
available to libraries as either entirely separate purchases or as
add-ons to previous purchases. List pricing for ECCO begins at
$500,000, but can vary depending on the institution and the extent of
their implementation.
While the price tag may be a hurdle for
many libraries, according to Mary Mercatante, marketing vice president,
Academic and Public Libraries for Gale, an unanticipated added benefit
for libraries recently came to light. The Association of Research
Libraries (ARL) ranks research libraries at institutions of higher
education across North America and one of the criteria they use for
ranking is the number of volumes a library makes available to its
patrons. A library that purchases ECCO can significantly increase its
total number of volumes available without requiring time to catalog,
shelve, and maintain individual copies. Thus, ECCO "can give them a
competitive advantage" when working toward ARL status, explains
Mercatante, particularly for smaller institutions.
This is
especially true since 10,000 of the titles in the collection are single
copies or so rare and fragile that the general public could not handle
them, so using ECCO makes information available to individuals who
would otherwise never have access to it. Gale has approximately 1.5
billion objects or titles in their vault and selections for ECCO are
generally made based on customer demand. "Customers tell us what their
needs are," says Nunn, and if something is rare or deemed necessary
enough then it goes on microfilm and the process begins.