Library resource spotlight: Early Modern Books

Introducing this month’s resource – Early Modern Books!

Early Modern Books covers materials from the British Isles and Europe across the period of 1450-1700. The database, which also includes access to content from Early English Books Online and Early European Books, allows users to view materials from over 225 source libraries worldwide including 4 national libraries, London’s Wellcome Library, and features many text transcriptions specifically created for the product.

Users can search the database using the basic search functionality, where they can search using their preferred search terms, whilst the advanced search functionality allows users to filter their search results by source type, document feature, language, publication date, author, document title, subject heading, as well as include spelling or form variants of their search terms in the search results.

The variant spelling and form searching functionality allows users to retrieve all instances of their search terms and its early modern variant inflected forms and spellings in their search results as well as early modern spelling variants of all the various inflected forms of the original search term. This is a process called lemmatization. Please note that variant searching is deactivated when quotes are put around the search terms to search phrases or when truncation or wildcard symbols are used.

The database can also be browsed by publication, date, author, country of publication, language, and Thomason Tracts, which allows users to browse the entire Thomason collection of pamphlets, books and newspapers from 1640-1661 as they were collected by volume and tract number.

For access, if you are not automatically logged in, please login with your Keele username and password. Early Modern Books is also available on the library’s A-Z of online resources and there’s a handy help page too!