The Library has set up a trial to Oxford University Press’ Electronic Enlightenment through October 23, 2010. Please send your comments and suggestions to Claude Potts at cpotts[at]library.berkeley.edu. Here’s the publisher’s description of this scholarly research project of the Bodleian Library at Oxford:
With 58,058 letters and documents and 6,929 correspondents as of September 2010, EE is the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. Through EE you can see the ideas and concerns not only of thinkers and scholars, politicians and diplomats, but also butchers and housewives, servants and shopkeepers. With a wealth of personal detail revealed in these personal documents, you can explore as never before the relationships, correspondence networks and movement of ideas, the letters and lives of the early modern world.
Scholarship with added value
Drawn from the best available critical editions, EE is not simply an “electronic bookshelf” of isolated texts but a network of interconnected documents, allowing you to see the complex web of personal relationships in the early modern period and the making of the modern world.
But that’s not all. The EE team has created an ongoing program of expanding, linking and original scholarly research to give you thousands of newly-composed biographical notes and hundreds of thousands internal links and cross-references.
Current facts about Electronic Enlightenment
Content
· 6,929 correspondents
· 44 nationalities from Europe, Asia & the Americas
· 671 occupations
· 58,058 letters and documents
· Information on 54,664 manuscript and 36,206 early edition sources
· 251,515 scholarly annotations
· 11 languages, including English, French, German & Italian
· 1,386 links to and from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
· External links to over 50 other online resources
Functionality
· Search correspondents by name or title, occupation, birth or death date & place
· Search documents by writer or recipient, date or place
· Search sources by country or archive
· Full text search of all documents, sources and notes
· Browse correspondents by surname, occupation or nationality
· Browse documents by decade
· Browse source editions by major author surname or publisher
· Citation formats and citation searching for letters and people
· Citation export to EndNote and RefManager bibliographic software
· Printer-friendly layout — for letters, people and annotations
· User-friendly help pages — context specific
Coming soon!
· Searching for documents by gender of author or recipient
· Social networking links for EE
· Browsing by location of publisher of EE source editions