The Rare Book Image Bank is a repository of images from the Rare Book Collection. Image metadata describes the subject matter, genre, format, and graphic content of the material, making a wide and rich selection of illustrations and decorative elements freely available to scholars and the public.
Include “Rare Book Collection” as a title in your search terms to limit results to items in the SLU's Rare Book Collection.
Include “Rare Book Collection” as a title in your search terms to limit results to items in the SLU's Rare Book Collection.
Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art
BASIRA (Books as Symbols in Renaissance Art) is a new, open-access online database of representations of books and other textual documents in the figurative arts between approximately 1300 and 1600 CE, the period encompassing the advent of print culture in Europe and its neighboring regions. Users anywhere can browse and query thousands of images of books from a constantly expanding dataset. Dozens of aspects of a book’s depiction can be searched, including details of its binding, bookmarks, contents, and position. In addition, users may search for the particulars of who or what is interacting with the book, and how that action is taking place.
Material Evidence in Incunabula
MEI is a database specifically designed to record and search the material evidence (or copy specific, post-production evidence and provenance information) of 15th-century printed books: ownership, decoration, binding, manuscript annotations, stamps, prices, etc.
Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (free)
The Incunabula Short Title Catalogue is the international database of 15th-century European printing created by the British Library with contributions from institutions worldwide.The database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates. 30,596 editions are listed as of October 2024, including some 16th-century items previously assigned incorrectly to the 15th century.
Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 (paid, accessible through SLU's Database Subscriptions)
The Making of Modern Law: Trials, 1600-1926 is a collection of documents from Anglo-American trials. Contains works pertaining to the United States, Britain, Ireland, Canada, and English-language titles about trials in other jurisdictions, such as France. Resources include published trial transcripts; popular printed accounts of sensational trials for murder; unofficially published accounts of trials, briefs, arguments, and other trial documents; official records of legislative proceedings, administrative proceedings, and arbitration sessions; and books and pamphlets about specific trials. Topics include adultery, commercial law, constitutional law, dueling, elections, impeachment, international law, land, military offenses, murder, sexuality, slavery, torts, treason, and wills.
ESTC: English Short Title Catalogue (free)
The ESTC is an essential resource for historians, English language and literature scholars, and all those interested in early printed books, periodicals and ephemera. It aims to provide bibliographic records for all known British printed material before 1801, held by the British Library and over 2,000 other institutions worldwide.
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks (free)
An easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland--or in Europe in the English language--from the beginning of printing through 1660.
Early English Books Online (paid, accessible through SLU's Database Subscriptions)
Contains page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America, as well as works in English printed elsewhere between 1473 and 1700. Transcriptions are available for more than 40% of these titles.
Early English Prose Fiction (free)
Early English Prose Fiction contains English prose works from the period 1500-1700, by writers from the British Isles. Exlcuded are non-fictional prose, translations (with the exception of Argenis from Barclay's Latin) and medieval 'survivals': works written before the period but printed within it. Each work in the database is keyed in full, including all prefatory matter and annotation by the original author. Bibliographic details of each of the editions used are included as are illustrations integral to the text and errata lists.
ESTC: English Short Title Catalogue (free)
The ESTC is an essential resource for historians, English language and literature scholars, and all those interested in early printed books, periodicals and ephemera. It aims to provide bibliographic records for all known British printed material before 1801, held by the British Library and over 2,000 other institutions worldwide.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (paid, accessible through SLU's Database Subscriptions)
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a vast eighteenth-century library at your desktop—a fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles amounting to over 34 million fully-searchable pages. ECCO is a digitization of the eighteenth-century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC).
CERL - Heritage of the Printed Book Database
The HPB Database (previously called the Hand Press Book Database) is a steadily growing collection of files of catalogue records from major European and North American research libraries covering items of European printing of the hand-press period (c.1455-c.1830) integrated into one file. This makes it possible for information to be retrieved in one single search across all files. As the digitisation of collections in contributing libraries progresses, more and more catalogue records point to digital presentations of the early printed books.
Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue
The Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Catalogue is a searchable, analytical and annotated list of all translations out of and into all languages printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland between 1473 and 1641. In these 167 years, over six thousand translations were printed, into and out of twenty-one languages. Yet they have never all been recorded as a group, in one place, and are often inadequately, or even inaccurately, described in existing catalogues. The catalogue also includes all translations out of all languages into English printed abroad before 1641.
WorldCat allows you to search thousands of libraries’ catalogs worldwide, all in one place. You can search WorldCat in nearly 500 languages to find physical items like books, audiobooks, maps, musical scores, and recordings, along with electronic items like ebooks, e-journals, articles, and digital images you can access online.
BibSite (free)
A project of the Bibliographical Society of America (BSA), BibSite is a hosting and discovery tool providing access to accumulated published and unpublished bibliographical videos, slide decks, conference papers, syllabi, and datasets from across the world wide web. As of AUgust 2025 BibSite comprised 206 resources in 13 languages, featuring 299 subject groups, with the help of 293 contributors.
Orlando - Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present (paid, accessible through SLU's Database Subscriptions)
Searchable database of digitally-encoded, collaboratively-authored scholarship about the history of women's writing, including documents about authors’ lives and works as well as contextual historical material.