The ASECS Executive Board is pleased to report that ASECS has acquired perpetual access to Gale-Cengage’s Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) 1 & 2 for all members based in North America. To access ECCO, follow this link http://asecs.press.jhu.edu/membership/log-in-to-gale. You will be prompted to enter the same login credentials that you use for the ASECS membership portal through Johns Hopkins University Press. Thanks are owed to the teams at Gale and JHUP for working quickly to set up access.
ECCO is the largest database of eighteenth-century texts on the market. ASECS represents the largest contingent of eighteenth-century scholars in the world. This partnership therefore makes an essential resource for scholars of the eighteenth-century widely available. Though the majority of the sources are in English, the database contains over 200,000 English-language and foreign-language titles printed in the United Kingdom between the years 1701 and 1800, including over 5,000 titles each in French and in Latin, with smaller numbers in Ancient Greek, German, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Spanish, and Welsh, and a few in other languages.
At a moment when secure academic employment is increasingly rare, and when universities are cutting library and research budgets even for those with secure appointments, expanding access to resources that allow scholars to do their work is critical. The Board believes that an ECCO purchase is perhaps the best way for ASECS to fulfill its primary mission of supporting outstanding scholarship on the eighteenth century, in an equitable way and at the broadest scale.
I hope you will join us in thanking former president Jeff Ravel and outgoing Executive Director Lisa Berglund, who spearheaded this initiative. They were joined on the negotiating team by ASECS Executive Board member Cathy Jaffe and ASECS treasurer Joe Bartolomeo.
For those of you in a position to do so, the best way to express your thanks is by donating to the newly created ECCO-Equity fund. Thanks to strong financial stewardship over the years, and support from the ASECS Gwin J. and Ruth Kolb Fund, the Society will pay a substantial portion of the overall cost. Our Society will still need to raise $70,000 from its membership over the next three years to support the purchase. We especially hope that those members who already have access to ECCO through their home institutions will support expanding access to colleagues in the field who do not.
If you have not yet renewed your membership for next year, you can add a contribution when you renew online here: https://asecs.press.jhu.edu/membership/join. Those who have already renewed for 2021–2022 can make a separate donation here: https://asecs.press.jhu.edu/membership/contribute.
We look forward to celebrating the launch of the ECCO-ASECS partnership with a series of events at our 2022 Annual Meeting in Baltimore.
Sincerely,
ASECS Executive Board
Comments