Early English Books Online

Early English Books Online (EEBO) contains the scanned images, and full-text digital versions where available, of over 125,000 books published in English up to 1700.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online

A digital collection of all the books published in Great Britain and its colonies during the eighteenth century. The collection includes works in English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish and Welsh, as well as sheet music, sermons and advertisements published from 1700-1799. Subject coverage:History and Geography, Social Science, Fine Arts, Music, Art & Architecture, Medicine, Science and Technology, Literature and Language, Religion and Philosophy, Law and General Reference

Nineteenth Century Collection (British Library) – 1789-1914

Over 65,000 recently digitised editions from the British Library’s 19th century collection, comprising over 25 million pages of previously rare and inaccessible titles.

UK Medical Heritage Library

UKMHL contains the images and full text of over 66,000 19th Century European medical publications. Visualisations are available on a separate platform. e.g. a map of hospitals that existed in the UK between 1870 and 1914.

• 1. Go to LibrarySearch 
     
     
  2. Log in using your CCCU username and password. If you are away from campus, or connecting with your own device over Wi-Fi, you will need to include @canterbury.ac.uk after your CCCU username.
     
     
  3. Select Find Databases A-Z, then click on H for Historical Texts (JISC), finally click on the link to the database to open it in a new tab.

You can browse the collection by author or publisher or cross search across all the collections. A graph tracking usage of words over time appears at the top of the search. This allows you to find out how often a topic has been mentioned in the texts in the collections. By clicking on the large plus symbol on the graph you can drag and select periods of time and identify how many hits or matches of the term there are available within that range.

In the Support menu, you can select Features to see themed collections e.g. Black history, Cookery, Music, Witchcraft and Magic, Shakespeare, Christmas, Science, Engineering and Technology and Sport and Fitness.

You can download texts by selecting them from the results list and opening in the viewer, then choose the download icon on the toolbar to download a PDF of the whole publication directly.

1. If you wanted to know how quinsy was treated in the mid to late Victorian period, you could search for the word quinsy in the search bar. (Note: quinsy is a slightly old-fashioned name for a peritonsillar abscess.) How many matches do you find?
   
   
2. Click on the plus symbol on the graph and select the range 1850-1900. Now click on the scissors symbol next to Range hits and snip out this section. How many results do you have now?
3. Find The Treatment of Quinsy published in The Practitioner in 1876. Look at the matches within the text and the various treatments and remedies prescribed such as leeches, ice, chromic acid, and tartaric acid gargles. (Be thankful for 21st century medicine!)
   
   
4. Filter your results by genre in the left hand pane to electronic books and look at The People’s Medical Lighthouse by B. Harmon Knox Root. Whose celebrated German ointment is the wonder of the age?
   
   
5. Filter your results by date. In which year can you find most matches for the term quinsy?
   
   
6. Look at one of the fantastic visualisations available via the UKML. e.g. the Medical Conditions Dendrogram and Sunburst which allow you to see the number of publications in the UK Medical Heritage Library that mention specific medical conditions, and to search for the relevant terms within the collection.

An accessibility statement for the site is available via the Accessibility link at the bottom of the page. You can:

• Change colours, contrast levels and fonts using browser plugins
  
  
• Zoom in up to 200% without the text spilling off the screen.
  
  
• Navigate most of the website using just a keyboard
  
  
• Listen to most of the website using a screen reader e.g. NVDA
  
  
• Skip to main content on nearly all pages.
  
  
• Access audiodescription for videos without sound

Your Learning and Research Librarian will be able to help you make the best use of online resources. For detailed guidance, book a tutorial via the Learning Skills Hub.