LibGuides: Finding books published in English: Home

FindIt@Bham: University Of Birmingham Library Catalogue

This is the most obvious bibliographic source to check. If you only want to see books, select Print Books from the tabs below the search box and do a search by keyword or author/title. When the results appear, click on the title of the book to see the complete bibliographic record.

For further details, see FindIt@Bham online help

National Retrospective Catalogues

A project led by the British Library to catalogue as far as possible all printed books published in the British Isles and North America from the first printed book in England in 1473 to the end of the nineteenth century has resulted in three 'short title catalogue' databases which list the books published in their respective time periods:

Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) This link opens in a new window
The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue is the international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide. Many links are provided to online digital facsimiles.
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) This link opens in a new window
The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 480,000 items published between 1473 and 1800 mainly in the British Isles and North America. .N.B. Owing to the recent cyber-attack on the British Library's catalogue system, online access to the ESTC is currently unavailable. A temporary search interface has been provided at https://estc.printprobability.org/.
Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC) This link opens in a new window
The NSTC project aims to provide increasingly complete listings of British books printed between 1801 and 1919. This includes books published in Britain, its colonies and the USA, as well as books published in English anywhere in the world, and translations from English into other languages. Libraries holding each item are indicated.

The following online collections contain full-text of early printed books:

Early English Books Online (EEBO) (ProQuest) (New Platform) This link opens in a new window
Digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700.
Early European Books - Collections 1 - 4 (5: Wellcome Library volumes only) This link opens in a new window
A digitised full-text collection of books printed in Europe before 1700 and housed in selected European libraries.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
A digital collection of the full text of over 150,000 books published in Britain between 1701-1800

Union Catalogues

JISC Library Hub Discover
https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/
A database of 201 UK and Irish academic, national and specialist library catalogues.

WorldCat

https://www.worldcat.org/
WorldCat is an ongoing project to provide an online union catalogue of major libraries throughout the world. At present, it includes over 2 billion items from more than 10,000 libraries worldwide.

Other Library Catalogues

Checking the holdings of other major libraries is another useful way of finding out what has been published by a given author, or on a given subject. You can then make arrangements to visit a library or obtain the items on inter-library loan.

Image: Humanities Reading Room, British Library

UK Libraries:

The British Library catalogue
https://www.bl.uk/
This is the search tool which searches through the British Library’s catalogue of books, newspapers, journals, maps and musical scores, as well as electronic resources, images, film, datasets and archived websites. It includes the holdings of the BL Document Supply Centre.

SOLO (Search Oxford Libraries Online)
https://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/discovery/search?vid=44OXF_INST:SOLO
This service searches the combined online catalogue of libraries in the University of Oxford which includes the 1 million titles originally listed in the Bodleian Library pre-1920 Catalogue of Printed Books.

Using other libraries

If you wish to visit another UK university library, you might be eligible for a SCONUL card. This will allow you reference access to a large number of academic libraries around the UK. For more information on using other libraries please look at Access Schemes.