Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a history of Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, a database of over 180,000 titles. Published by Gale in 2003 it has had an enormous impact of the study of the eighteenth century. Like many commercial digital archives, ECCO's continuing development obscures its precedents. This Element examines its prehistory as, first, a computer catalogue of eighteenth-century print, and then as a commercial microfilm collection, before moving to the digitisation and development of the interfaces to ECCO, as well as Gale's various partnerships and licensing deals. An essential aspect of this Element is how it explores the socio-cultural and technological debates around the access to old books from the 1930s to the present day: Stephen Gregg demonstrates how these contexts powerfully shape the way ECCO works to this day. The Element's aim is to make us better users and better readers of digital archives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it