UCL Rare-Books Club: new 18th-century finds at UCL Special Collections

ONLINE EVENT

UCL's rare-book collections are known for their strengths in Early Modern and 19th-century materials, but until recently haven't been thought to have particularly distinguished 18th-century holdings.

However through the process of identifying and preparing materials for digitisation for the online resource Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), a wide range of our 18th-century printed items have emerged as either unique - titles and editions not previously appearing in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) - or copies formerly not identified on ESTC alongside other institutions' 18th-century holdings.

Newly discovered 18th-century publications include works on volcanoes and agricultural enclosures, works by a female chemist, by Mary Wollstonecraft and on astronomy for women, and newly identified editions of works by Swift, Defoe, Pope and Beckford. New finds also include a rare edition of a work of 18th-century science fiction and correspondence on growing vines in Bermuda.

In this online event Caroline Kimbell (UCL's Interim Head Of Commercial Licensing And Digitisation) and Julia de Mowbray (Publisher at Gale Cengage which publishes Eighteenth Century Collections Online) will talk about some of these discoveries and about ECCO, Gale's online resource of digitised 18th-century materials. They will also discuss the process of contributing to a commercial digitisation resource and how Caroline and the UCL Special Collections team went about identifying unique items among UCL's catalogued holdings.

This event is likely to be of interest to those researching 18th-century literature, writing and publishing on a wide range of topics, library cataloguing, digitisation of rare materials, and digital humanities.

UCL Rare-Books Club aims to promote UCL’s Special Collections and to facilitate conversations between curators, research students and professional researchers working on the collections, but sessions are open to all. They are chaired by Dr. Tabitha Tuckett, UCL Rare-Books And Academic Liaison Librarian. Events are informal and there will be time for questions and discussion after the presentations.