Gale, a Cengage company, has partnered with the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), the world's largest organization of eighteenth-century scholars, to provide its North American membersⁱ with access to Gale's Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). Now ASECS members have access to the most comprehensive online historical archive on the eighteenth-century, enabling scholarship, enhanced teaching and advanced study of the era.

ECCO is an essential resource for scholars to better support research and teaching on the eighteenth-century.

"ECCO is an essential resource for scholars of the eighteenth-century, but many people working in the field do not currently have access to it. They have to travel across the world to research libraries to view and study eighteenth-century collections, which can be very expensive," said Mark Boonshoft, executive director at ASECS. "By providing online access to ECCO to our members in North America, we help ameliorate this inequity and better support research and teaching on the eighteenth-century. We are thrilled to partner with Gale to make this happen."

ECCO contains every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom between the years 1701 and 1800, offering scholars full-text searching across 26 million pages of books and directories, bibles, sheet music, sermons, advertisements and works by both celebrated and lesser­known authors. Expanding the ECCO archive, the titles in Part II have an emphasis on literature, social science, and religion. It also includes nearly fifty thousand titles and seven million pages from the library holdings of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, University of Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland and the Ransom Center at the University of Texas.

With ASECS members coming from a wide range of disciplines and professions beyond academia, ECCO access will:

• Put the world's largest archive on the eighteenth-century in the hands of hundreds of scholars, creating greater public awareness and understanding of the eighteen-century world.
• Provides access to independent scholars (those without university affiliation), making it easier for them to conduct research on the eighteenth-century.
• Expand scholarship and research to less endowed institutions and independent researchers, with continued access to eighteenth-century content outside of academia.

"As the leading provider of digital humanities learning tools and primary sources to support research, Gale is committed to promoting scholarship on the eighteenth-century," said Roger Strong, vice president of sales for academic libraries at Gale. "This partnership with ASECS enable us to more closely align resources like ECCO to course integration and digital humanities pedagogy, including joint efforts around the sharing of research outcomes, and the continued development of primary source tools and platforms to support the future needs of ASECS and other learned societies."

ASECS north American members can access ECCO at: https://www.asecs.org/ecco.

About American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)

The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), established in 1969, is the foremost learned society in the United States for the study of all aspects of the period from the later seventeenth through the early nineteenth century. Our members are literary scholars and writers, historians, theorists of gender, race, sexuality, disability, nation and empire; philosophers and political theorists; art historians and artists; musicologists and musicians; theater historians and practitioners; biographers and bibliographers; and specialists in other humanistic, artistic, and social scientific fields with a range of broad and more particular interests. We are committed to fostering an inclusive and welcoming environment in which all members participate fully in the exchange of knowledge and ideas. For more information please visit: https://www.asecs.org/. 

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About Cengage and Gale
Cengage, an education technology company serving millions of learners in 165 countries, advances the way students learn through quality, digital experiences. The company currently serves the K-12, higher education, professional, library, English language teaching and workforce training markets worldwide. Gale, a Cengage company, provides libraries with original and curated content, as well as the modern research tools and technology that are crucial in connecting libraries to learning, and learners to libraries. For more than 60 years, Gale has partnered with libraries around the world to empower the discovery of knowledge and insights – where, when and how people need it. Gale has 500 employees globally with its main operations in Farmington Hills, Michigan. For more information, please visit  www.gale.com.