UK students can now take their studies back in time to the 18th century, as the Joint Information Systems Committe has purchased a digital library of 135,000 titles dating from 1701 to 1800 from Thomson Gale. The Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) features full-texts of 26 million pages, allowing readers to look at the actual scanned page of 300-year-old texts from the British Library, Oxford and Cambridge libraries and many others.

Univerities pay an annual fee of pay an annual fee between £2,250 and £3,500 to access the material.

With materials from the UK and across the world, across a range of topics, the collection means researchers and students can view books that previously would have been difficult or impossible to access.