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Department Resources | Library Resources | Early English Books Online
Library Resources
Early English Books Online - EEBO
Overview:
EEBO offers library users at subscribing institutions access to digitized images of the world's most distinguished and extensive rare book collections in English. The database currently includes more than 125,000 titles published between 1475 and 1700. EEBO is becoming standard in academic libraries throughout the United States and Britain. For more details, see
Product Site
Important Features:
Access to the full text of rare books
EEBO provides a high-quality photgraphic images of every page of every book in the database, including illustrations, marginalia, and manuscript notes or inscriptions added by early owners and readers of a particular copy. For many scholarly and pedagogical purposes, EEBO provides all the same relevant information as an actual copy of the book.
Accessibility and convenience
EEBO can be used from any computer logged into the university server so that books can perused from the library reading room, from internet-connected classrooms, or from the home computers of current MU faculty and students. Many users can access the database, and even the same text, simultaneously. A researcher can conduct a search and browse through results quickly, simply by typing in keywords and then clicking the titles of the items he or she wishes to see.
Advantages for Undergraduates:
Undergraduate Testimonials
Access
For undergraduates, EEBO provides the opportunity to browse through rare books they would otherwise never be able to see (without pursuing an advanced degree in a related field). Most important rare-book libraries are open only to Ph.D.s and advanced graduate students.
Historically-informed reading
EEBO helps undergraduates to become more sophisticated and historically-informed readers. They gain a sense of how the annotated, modernized texts they purchase for classes such as Shakespeare and Milton differ from original Renaissance texts, and of how editing, annotating, and anthologizing are themselves forms of interpretation.
Active intellectual inquiry
EEBO enables a shift from passive reception to active intellectual inquiry in the study of unfamiliar historical periods and texts. Rather than relying on an instructor as the sole dispenser of historical background, students can use EEBO to discover and present their own connections.
Importance to Faculty and Graduate Students:
Faculty Testimonials
Graduate Student Testimonials
Productivity
The lack of key digital resources places ambitious scholars at a disadvantage with respect to their peers and similar institutions. Due to the general availability of resources such as EEBO at colleges and universities across the country, standards in academic publishing are changing. Scholars are expected to consult a much greater number and variety of sources in the production of an article or book. In view of these changing expectations, MU faculty will fall short in the judgment of the reviewers employed by journals and academic presses.
Recruitment and retention
The availability of research resources is an important consideration for any prospective graduate student or faculty job candidate choosing among multiple institutions. Nearly all job candidates from high caliber graduate programs will now have had access to EEBO throughout their graduate school careers and will already have planned book projects and research areas with the assumption that they will have convenient access to rare materials.
Advertised Price: $134,700 (one-time subscription)/$11,700 (annually)
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