Library Resources

The University Library has outstanding resources for research in English. The Copyright Deposit Collection contains approximately 40,000 volumes, covering the whole subject area from 1709 to 1837, as well as approximately 5,000 volumes of periodicals which ceased publication before 1841. Some of this material, in fact, is not held in the National Library of Scotland. The collection therefore offers an impressive range of opportunities for research in eighteenth-century literature, in the Scottish Enlightenment and in Romanticism.

The Library holds the Short Title Catalogue on microfilm, enabling researchers to read and print out their own copies of any book published in Britain before 1642. It also subscribes to Early English Books Online (EEBO), the digitised version of this catalogue. In addition, the School and the University subscribe to a considerable number of other electronic resources, notably JSTOR and the Chadwyck-Healey Literature Online databases, which allow sophisticated searches to be made through a vast corpus of literary material.