Individual Article:
Database delivers Goldsmiths' and Kress collections
The acquisition of a new digital database on the history of economic thought and practice promises to dramatically transform the research process for Northwestern University scholars. The Making of the Modern World: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature 1450-1850 includes digital facsimiles of the holdings of two of the world’s premier economic and business history collections: The Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature at the University of London Library, and the Kress Collection of Business and Economics at the Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. It also includes materials from the Seligman Collection in the Butler Library at Columbia University and the Yale University Libraries—a total of 61,000 books published between 1450 and 1850, and 450 serials dating from before 1906.
Professor of Economics Joel Mokyr says the convenience of having these collections online will have a profound effect on researchers’ lives. “The Goldsmiths’ collection in London and the Kress collection in Boston were almost annual pilgrimages that graduate students and young researchers in my field would have to undertake,” he recalls. “Many of my graduate students, even recent ones, still had to board planes and sleep in cheap hotels to read these books and pamphlets.”
While the Library has long held portions of the collections on microfilm, the online edition makes a comprehensive version available in an easily searchable format. Scanned facsimiles of the original books, pamphlets, proclamations, photographs, illustrations, and other materials include works on the rise of European colonies, the development and abolition of slavery, the emergence of socialism, agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, and social conditions. The collection also includes books from the personal libraries of Adam Smith, Lord Sheffield, David Ricardo, John Locke, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Robert Owen, Sir Robert Peel, William Wordsworth, and Karl Marx.
Questions or comments about The Making of the Modern World should be directed to bibliographer Harriet Lightman, h-lightman@northwestern.edu or x1-2920.