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EEBO Search Guide

What's EEBO?

Early English Books Online is a database containing facsimile and fulltext links to about 100,000 Early English Books, pamphlets and other materials printed in England from 1473-1700.

How Do I Search in EEBO?

From the main page, you can get into EEBO's records in three ways: a basic search, an advanced search, or by browsing.  Basic search is the best option for most searches.

The Basic Search Page

From top to bottom:

The orange box at the top of the page contains check boxes to search using variant spellings and variant forms.  Variant spelling is quite common in Early English books.  Unless you are using truncation and wildcard operators in your searching, you will probably want to check the variant spellings box to ensure a full set of results.  For example, searching "dog" with this box checked will return documents containing "dog" "dogg" and "dogge."

The Keyword(s) field is best used when you cannot be certain that your search term is better suited for the author, title, or subject fields.

The Limit to menu allows you to limit your search to documents with either images (most of the collection) or those with keyed fulltext (a small portion of the collection).

The author, title and subject keyword fields allow you to search by terms you expect to define the sort of document you're searching for. The "Select from a list" link next to each keyword field can be quite useful, particularly if you have a specific topic but aren't exactly sure how EEBO might describe it.

The Bibliographic Number field is used if you have a citation for a document from the Short Title Catalogue.

Limit by Date allows you to limit your results list by date of publication.

More on Variant Spelling

While the variant spelling feature is generally quite effective, it is always possible that your term will have variants in the database that it does not return.  A few rules of thumb might be useful if you're trying to guess at a variant:

• 'Y' is sometimes substituted for 'i' (i.e., faith or fayth)
• The addition of an ‘e' to the end of a word, or the possible omission of it when it should belong at the end of a word. (i.e., faith or faithe)
• ‘W' is sometimes listed as ‘VV' (i.e., William or VVilliam, or farewell or farevvell)
• ‘U' is sometimes substituted for ‘V' (i.e., advertisement or aduertisement) and vice verse
• "I" is sometimes substituted for "J" (Jesus or Iesus)

How Do I Interpret My List of Results?

Your results page has a header and a list of results

Header

At the top of the header on your results page you'll find information about your search- the terms searched and the number of records returned.  From here you can refine your search or sort your results list alphabetically by author or title or by earliest/latest date.

Your Results

Below the line you'll find a list of your results.  The checkbox next to each record allows you to keep a list of records you'd like to go back to.  The compiled list of checked records, or Marked List is accessible from the top of every EEBO page via the eponymous link.  If you take advantage of the marked list feature be sure to print, download or email the list before closing your EEBO session.

Icon Key

The following icons will appear to the left of each returned record.

/ -Adds/Remove from your marked list

Takes you to the full record for a result

Takes you to the document image page (the document itself)

Takes you to the document's illustrations page

Takes you to the full-keyed text page for the document (not available for most documents)

Takes you to thumbnails of the document.  Clicking on the thumbnail image to the left of the record will also take you to this page.

For comments on this page contact: Harriett Green.

Last modified by: Peter Coco on 11/5/08