The Sanborn maps. Ask any historian of early American history “what’s a Sanborn map?” and you’re likely to receive an earful. The maps, which cover American cities decade-by-decade, chart the rapid change and growth of this country’s urban areas in a way matched by few other primary sources.  The digitized versions of Sanborn maps have been used by historians for years. However, there exists a vital tool which has not been accessible in an integrated(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce a new source available to your patrons. Now ready to search in Eight Centuries: the Tate Collection. Founded in 1897 and originally named the National Gallery of British Art, the Tate has since grown into a four gallery institution spread across the UK, from London to Liverpool and Cornwall. The Tate Collection in Eight Centuries contains records for the nearly 70,000 objects that comprise the holdings of the museum. Links to the Tate catalog in each record(read more)

Another recent addition to Eight Centuries is now ready to search by your patrons: the Art Institute of Chicago Catalog. Founded in 1879, the Art Institute of Chicago is one of the premier art institutions in the United States. The catalog searchable in Eight Centuries contains over 120,000 records describing artworks from as far back as the ancient world and as recent as the contemporary period. Links to catalog entries on the Art Institute website are provided, which include full images(read more)

Another recent addition to Eight Centuries is now ready to search by your patrons: records of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Open Access Collection. Founded in 1870 in New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the largest art museums in the world with a collection stretching over 5,000 years of world art history. The Met OA collection searchable in Eight Centuries comprises over 200 thousand records, containing links to catalog entries, as well as image links where(read more)

Paratext is happy to announce another recent addition to Eight Centuries: records of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Collection in New York City. Founded in 1929, the Museum of Modern Art is one of the world’s premier collections of art from the modern period and beyond. The MoMA collection in Eight Centuries contains records to artworks dating from the eighteenth century to the present day. The MoMA collection searchable in Eight Centuries comprises nearly 140 thousand records,(read more)

Paratext is happy to announce another recent addition to Eight Centuries: records of the Cleveland Museum of Art Collection. Founded in 1913, the Cleveland Museum of Art remains one of the premier public art institutions in the United States. The CMA’s collection stretches from the ancient British Isles and Egypt to contemporary artists working in the twenty-first century. The CMA collection searchable in Eight Centuries comprises nearly 64 thousand records, containing links to(read more)

Paratext is happy to announce another recent addition to Eight Centuries: the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). A database founded in 2006 and maintained by a consortium of United States and European libraries and academies, the BHL operates as an Open Source resource for the biological research community. The BHL data contained in Eight Centuries comprises over 166 thousand records to biology texts ranging from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Within the Biodiversity(read more)

Data from the Mapping Early American Elections project is now available to search in Eight Centuries. A project completed by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and made available for public use, Mapping Early American Elections (MEAE) is a database of United States election results from 1787 to 1825. The nearly 13 thousand MEAE records in Eight Centuries link to fully mapped election results available on the project’s website. Within(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce two new sources now available to search in Eight Centuries: the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog and the Samuel Pepys Diary. The Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Catalog is a compilation of records describing printed and photographic material housed in the Library of Congress collections. This invaluable catalog contains over 1.4 million records describing material in the collection, including links to full text in many cases. The(read more)

2022 was a significant year for Eight Centuries from Paratext.   We completed our two year transition from “19th Century Masterfile” to Eight Centuries, added nearly 70 million additional records, and implemented vastly improved navigation features to all our products.   Now that the Eight Centuries name is in place we suggest:     Updating your library’s database A-Z list: replace “19th Century Masterfile” with(read more)

In 2021 we added an entirely new feature for subscribers of multiple products: Cross Search. This feature allows easy instant searching of a search term across Eight Centuries, U.S. Documents Masterfile, and Reference Universe. To celebrate this exciting new feature, we’re looking back at different sources now easily accessible across products via Cross Search. Today: the Atlantic Monthly historical index available to search in 8C. With apologies to the late columnist Syd Harris(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce the addition of nearly 53 million records from Europeana into Eight Centuries, opening up unprecedented access to the cultural heritage contained in Europe’s myriad cultural institutions.   An initiative of the European Union that has been growing since its inception in 2005, Europeana brings together the collections of thousands of European archives and museums into one vast dataset for use by researchers and the general public.   By(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that two new sources of Smithsonian Institution metadata and full text links are now accessible via Eight Centuries. Not only is this important for the sheer usefulness of additional source data, these new sources represent a milestone in the history of Eight Centuries itself. When this project began in 1999 (as “Poole’s Plus,” and later, “19th Century Masterfile”) there were all of two datasets—the first: an enhanced(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce the new Sources Snapshot redesign in Eight Centuries. Our new tiled system is an improvement for a number of reasons. For one, this new layout makes better use of wide screen space, giving you a clearer, easier-to-parse view of all search results at a single glance. The source tiles will still be rendered from most to least number of record hits, requiring no change in your existing Eight Centuries workflow. Furthermore, the new layout will adapt to any(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that data from the Walters Art Museum’s “Digital Walters” manuscript collection is now accessible via Eight Centuries. This data—made available through the museum’s Digital Walters initiative—comprises over 150,000 records of folio that make up the nearly 900 illuminated medieval manuscripts in the Walters collection. Records includes full text links leading to high resolution scans of each page. Explore the Islamic world,(read more)

Paratext is proud to announce that we've added all pre-1961 British National Bibliography content to Eight Centuries. Originally founded by the British Museum and currently supported by the British Library, the British National Bibliography has continuously compiled the publishing output of Great Britain since its creation in 1949. Users can now search 158,000 records to magazines, books, and newspapers — some dating as far back as the 14th century. The BNB content embraces(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that records from the Modernist Journals Project is now accessible via Eight Centuries. The Modernist Journals Project (MJP) is joint cataloging and digitizing venture between Brown University and the University of Tulsa which comprises records of journal output of the modernist literary period from 1890 to 1922. The MJP adds nearly ten thousand new periodical content records to Eight Centuries. Furthermore, in addition to the records themselves, MJP(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that additional content from Adam Matthew is now accessible via Eight Centuries.   Adam Matthew, an imprint of SAGE, is an award-winning publisher of digital primary source collections for the humanities and social sciences, covering subject areas from medieval family life to 20th-century history and culture.   Nearly 40,000 links from 11 collections have been added to Eight Century’s Image/Media section, broadening research for all(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce the addition of two Open Access resources which join the millions of proprietary primary source records in the Eight Centuries database: Documenting the American South and Chronicling America.   These two sources add over 150,000 entirely new records, with thousands of links to high quality full text and metadata.   Documenting the American South, a project of the University of North Carolina, makes digitized content from the UNC Library(read more)

Over the last month, we have made some exciting new changes to 19th Century Masterfile—not least the introduction of a new name: Eight Centuries. Additionally, we have we have added new source material to our already-extensive database, and streamlined the interface to make finding sources easier, faster, and more intuitive. See below for a detailed list of the improvements made to 8C in the new year:   Name change: 19th Century Masterfile (NCM) is now Eight Centuries(read more)

The Autumn of 2017 brings great new content to 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930, along with recently deployed new search utilities to improve search results, particularly for non-specialists. The following sources have just been added to 19th Century Masterfile. United States National Archives 19th Century Masterfile now contains over 1.5 million new citations from the United States National Archives image collection. The range of this collection is quite vast,(read more)

356 years after The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge held their first 'learned society' meeting in 1660, Paratext announces the addition of The Society's International Catalogue of Scientific Literature, 1901-1914 to 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930. This is the continuation of the monumental Catalogue of Scientific Papers 1800-1900, which Paratext deployed in 2012.   The International Catalogue is the largest single editorial(read more)

Paratext is pleased to announce that extensive content from Adam Matthew is now accessible via 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930. Adam Matthew, an imprint of SAGE, is an award-winning publisher of digital primary source collections for the humanities and social sciences, covering subject areas from medieval family life to 20th-century history and culture. Nearly 100,000 links from 33 collections are being added to 19th Century Masterfile’s Image/Media section, broadening research(read more)

After 18 years in the making, Paratext can finally introduce its newest, most exciting utility for The Commons. Library practitioners can now delve deeper into the content of 19th Century Masterfile: 1106-1930. We’ve created a new search function which allows you to search what is inside 19th Century Masterfile by Periodical Title, Index, and by Language. This utility allows library practitioners to explore the vast coverage of historical periodical literature within 19th Century(read more)

Many bibliographers and scholars using 19th Century Masterfile have asked for expanded coverage of the visual arts. To that end, we're very happy to announce that Graves’ Indexes to Art Exhibitions 1760-1912 is now completely digitized and online in 19th Century Masterfile. Graves’ indexes are a seminal resource not only for the study of art, but for users from numerous scholarly disciplines. These indexes offer the researcher opportunities(read more)

Paratext’s 19th Century Masterfile 1106-1930 now contains links to 472,764 articles to the 380 titles within JSTOR’s Early Journal Content. The vital Early Journal Content data augments the 8,000+ journals already indexed within19th Century Masterfile, further establishing it as the essential ‘due diligence’ repository for pre-1930 studies. The Early Journal Content covers arts and humanities, economics, politics, mathematics and other sciences. Begin your(read more)

A major enhancement to 19th Century Masterfile will be deployed in January 2013. This new enhancement includes: Faster links to the 20 million+ full text sources from both fee-based and Open Access repositories. Enhanced de-limiting functions–by date; by format; and by subject and more. Detailed resource descriptions to give users a better understanding of the context of their results. Simplified exporting of citation data in a variety of(read more)

The Granite Monthly was a New Hampshire publication that covered news, issues of import to the society of the time and general interest articles. It now joins over 70 other valuable primary source indexes that enjoy easier discovery with one searchbox in 19th Century Masterfile. The Granite Monthly file in 19th Century Masterfile contains nearly 20,000 primary source records from 1877-1930.  Most of these citations conveniently include links(read more)

The Royal Society is the oldest scientific academy still in existence, having begun in the 17th century with the regular meetings of natural philosophers interested in promoting knowledge of the natural world through observation and experiment. Paratext is pleased to announce that more than 6,000 links to the full text of the Royal Society Journals are now included in 19th Century Masterfile. The journals make up part of the more than 1,500 titles indexed within(read more)

Paratext announces that hundreds of thousands of citations from the ARTstor Digital Library will be indexed and integrated into Paratext’s 19th Century Masterfile database, allowing historians and scholars from many disciplines to expand their art history research. The ARTstor Digital Library is a nonprofit resource that provides more than one million digital images in a variety of subjects. The Digital Library serves educators, scholars, curators,(read more)

As we’ve all been recently reminded of the important role Congress plays in ensuring the day to day functions of democracy, it can be useful to keep in mind the history of one of our most influential government institutions. 19th Century Masterfile now includes the indexes to the Annals of Congress, the Register of Debates and much of the Congressional Globe, bringing our coverage of Congressional papers up to the 39th Congress in 1867, with greater coverage(read more)

19th Century Masterfile has always been the ‘due diligence’ resource for historians. Its usefulness is now expanded to cover works in both technology and agricultural science. To that end, Paratext has significantly enhanced the scope and research value of 19th Century Masterfile for historical agricultural studies through the addition of the Index to Farmers’ Bulletin, 1889-1930. The Farmers’ Bulletin was for many years one of the most(read more)