Early English Books Online™, 1475-1700 (EEBO) provides digital access to more than 125,000 literary and historical classics. Through the Web, researchers can view images that accurately reflect the way the works appeared in their original printed editions.

The first project from the massive ProQuest Digital Vault™ initiative, Early English Books Online contains images of works by such authors as Malory, Spenser, Bacon, More, Erasmus, Boyle, Newton, and Galileo. The database also includes musical exercises by Henry Purcell, novels by Aphra Behn, and prayer books, pamphlets, proclamations, almanacs, calendars, and many other primary resources.

When complete, EEBO will contain all the works, more than 22 million pages, represented in the microfilm series Early English Books I & II, which include the titles listed in these comprehensive bibliographic records of English literature: The Short-Title Catalogue (Pollard & Redgrave, 1475-1640); The Short-Title Catalogue II (Wing, 1641-1700); The Thomson Tracts, a compendium of broadsides on the English Civil War printed between 1640 and 1661; and The Early English Books Tract Supplements.

Students and scholars can search Early English Books Online by keyword, author, or title, or they can browse by subjects such as history, literature, and religion. EEBO also includes an advanced interface that makes it easy to build Boolean queries; limit a search to a specific source library, language, or collection; review search histories; and combine previous sets of results.

Initial results include brief bibliographic citations. After receiving them, researchers can view more detailed records, mark specific documents for printing or downloading, and sort results alphabetically, by relevance, or by date.

Researchers can view complete, digitized images of original pages from all the works in the database and even manipulate them by, for example, zooming in and out or printing pages one at a time. To accompany the page images, a separate initiative called the Text Creation Partnership is in the process of creating searchable, ASCII full-text versions of 25,000 of the documents, and participants in the partnership will be able to access the full text through the EEBO interface.

Because it is such a large database offering unprecedented access to unique material, EEBO can open new avenues for research in multiple academic fields.

The database is available on the Web through a custom interface. It is suitable for all types of researchers whether they are online novices or information professionals.

Online subscriptions allow unlimited searching for a set fee, and many libraries have integrated EEBO into their cataloging systems EEBO MARC records, which provide seamless links from the library's OPAC to the corresponding image in EEBO.

Smaller institutions or specialized programs might be interested in the EEBO topical collection, Biblical Studies, which focus on material in the database specific to church history and theology.

MARC Records are available for purchase separately.

For a free trial please contact your ProQuest representative at pqsales@proquest.com or 800-521-0600, ext. 73344.