Special Libraries News

Philologic @ NU Goes Live

Northwestern University Library is pleased to announce that "Philologic at NU" has gone live this week at http://philologic.northwestern.edu/.

Philologic at NU brings together the full corpus of 14,486 searchable early modern English texts created by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) based on Chadwyck-Healey's "Early English Books Online" (EEBO) database, combining them with a dozen other Chadwyck-Healey databases. Institutions with licenses to all constituent databases also have access to a unique omnibus database called "combo": This database allows one-stop searching of EEBO-TCP plus Early American Fiction, Eighteenth Century Fiction, Early English Prose Fiction, English Poetry, English Prose Drama, English Verse Drama, and Nineteenth Century Fiction: 23,496 unique texts in all.

"Philologic at NU" also includes the "Virtual Modernization" feature developed at Northwestern by Prof. Martin Mueller and NU Academic Technologies with the moral (and financial) support of the entire CIC. With Virtual Modernization, students and researchers can search early modern English texts using modern spellings, and all variant spellings are automatically invoked. Virtual Modernization has also been adopted by Chadwyck-Healey for its EEBO site worldwide.

"Philologic at NU" is a no-charge service of Northwestern University Library to members of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Non-CIC members may request access privileges and will be added initially at no charge, but later (and subject to funding constraints) for a modest annual fee. Access to individual databases requires a license from the content owner: ProQuest and/or EEBO-TCP. Access to the "Combo" database is restricted to institutions with licensed access to all constituent databases. An exception to these access restrictions is the "Shakespeare Sources" database, which is currently open to the public without restriction.

Direct all queries regarding Philologic at NU to speciallibraries@northwestern.edu.

PhiloLogic, developed by the ARTFL Project at the University of Chicago in collaboration with The University of Chicago Library's Electronic Text Services, provides sophisticated searching of a wide variety of large encoded databases on the World Wide Web.

This project has been realized over the last three years as a collaboration between Northwestern, the University of Chicago, ProQuest/Chadwyck-Healey, and the member institutions of the CIC, all of whom contributed funding for this project.