The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a union short-title catalogue of works published between 1473 and 1800, in

Britain Britain most often refers to: * Great Britain, a large island comprising the countries of England, Scotland and Wales * The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, a sovereign state in Europe comprising Great Britain and the north-eas ...

and its former colonies, notably those in North America, and primarily in English, drawing on the collections of the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

and other libraries in Britain and around the world. It is co-managed by the British Library and the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research (CBSR) at the

University of California, Riverside The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Riverside, California, United States. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of Cali ...

. The database is freely searchable. In October 2023, the database went offline, along with the broader digital infrastructure of the British Library, due to a ransomware cyberattack. A temporary version of the pre-1700 ESTC, derived from data captured in 2014, is hosted at https://estc.printprobability.org/. As of January 2024, the Print Probability data also includes limited post-1700 ESTC entries. In May 2025, a complete version of the English Short Title Catalogue was relaunched in beta by the

Consortium of European Research Libraries The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) is a consortium of research libraries, primarily in Europe, that facilitates access to historians with an interest in the history of the book by providing online resources. The organisation also ...

(CERL) at https://datb.cerl.org/estc/, in collaboration with the original ESTC teams at the British Library and CBSR. This platform included a new search history function.

History

The ESTC began life as the Eighteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue, with the same abbreviation, covering only 1701 to 1800. Earlier printed works had been catalogued in A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave's ''Short Title Catalogue'' (1st edn 1926; 2nd edn, 1976–91) for the period 1473 to 1640; and Donald Goddard Wing's similarly titled bibliography (1945–51, with later supplements and addenda) for the period 1641 to 1700. These works were eventually incorporated into the database.

References

Bibliography

*Barker, Nicolas. "The Author as Editor."''

The Book Collector ''The Book Collector'' is a London-based journal that deals with all aspects of the book. It is published quarterly and exists in both paper and digital form. It prints independent opinions on subjects ranging from typography to national heritag ...

'' 41 (no 1) Spring, 1992:9-27. * Snyder, Henry L. and Michael S. Smith (eds.) ''The English Short-Title Catalogue: past, present, future''. New York: AMS, 2003.

External links

English Short Title Catalogue
(free access via the British Library) * Alston, Robin

* print & probability
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) Search
(independent, temporary interface to the ESTC made available following the British Library's 2023 cyber-attack) {{Authority control British Library Bibliography Short title catalogues Online databases Early modern printing databases

History

See also

References

Bibliography

External links