On October 28, 2015, the Renaissance Society of America sent an email to all members announcing the demise of their previous partnership with ProQuest (now in control of ExLibris too). Their email to all of us, in full:

The RSA Executive Committee regrets to announce that ProQuest has canceled our subscription to the Early English Books Online database (EEBO). The basis for the cancellation is that our members make such heavy use of the subscription, this is reducing ProQuest’s potential revenue from library-based subscriptions. We are the only scholarly society that has a subscription to EEBO, and ProQuest is not willing to add more society-based subscriptions or to continue the RSA subscription. We hoped that our special arrangement, which lasted two years, would open the door to making more such arrangements possible, to serve the needs of students and scholars. But ProQuest has decided for the moment not to include any learned societies as subscribers. Our subscription will end a few days from now, on October 31. We realize this is very late notice, but the RSA staff have been engaged in discussions with ProQuest for some weeks, in the hope of negotiating a renewal. If they change their mind, we will be the first to re-subscribe.

This is truly terrible news, especially for anyone whose institution did not/could not subscribe to the ProQuest interface.

**EDIT 29 Oct 8:05pm**: the RSA confirms that access to EEBO via ProQuest will continue:

We are delighted to convey the following statement from ProQuest:

“We’re sorry for the confusion RSA members have experienced about their ability to access Early English Books Online (EEBO) through RSA. Rest assured that access to EEBO via RSA remains in place. We value the important role scholarly societies play in furthering scholarship and will continue to work with RSA — and others — to ensure access to ProQuest content for members and institutions.”

The RSA subscription to EEBO will not be canceled on October 31, and we look forward to a continued partnership with ProQuest.

Perhaps because the first set of TCP editions of the EEBO texts are now part of the public domain, this is supposed to be sufficient for scholars’ use. Of course, this is not true: the TCP texts are a facsimile of the EEBO images (themselves facsimiles of facsimiles). However inadequate the TCP texts are for someone without an EEBO subscription, I have been collecting a number of links for a number of years about how to access and use EEBO(TCP). Despite overturning this decision, the benefit of having all these resources listed together seems to justify their continued existence here. They are also available on my links page, but in the interest of accessibility, here they are replicated:

1 EEBO(TCP) documentation
Text Creation Partnership http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/
EEBO-TCP documentation http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/docs/
EEBO-TCP Tagging Cheatsheet: Alphabetical list of tags with brief descriptions http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/docs/dox/cheat.html
Text Creation Partnership Character Entity List http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/docs/code/charmap.htm
The History of Early English Books Online http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/History_of_Early_English_Books_Online
Using Early English Books Online http://folgerpedia.folger.edu/Using_Early_English_Books_Online

2 Access to EEBO(TCP) full texts (searchable)
Early English Books Online (EEBO): JISC historical books interface (UK, paywall, free access from the British Library Reading Room) http://historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/
Early English Books Online (EEBO): Chadwyck-Healey interface (outside UK, paywall; your mileage may vary by country) http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home

The Dutch National Library has off-site access, including full EEB (European books), ECCO (18C), TEMPO (pamphlets), for members, 15€/yr. Register online: inschrijven.kb.nl/index.php

EEBO-TCP Texts on Github https://github.com/textcreationpartnership/Texts
UMichigan TCP repository https://umich.app.box.com/s/nfdp6hz228qtbl2hwhhb/
UMichigan EEBO-TCP full text search http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebogroup/*
University of Oxford Text Archive TCP full text search http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/*
* These sites are mirrors of each other
See also 10 things you can do with EEBOTCP

EEBO-TCP Ngram reader, concordancer, & text counts  http://earlyprint.wustl.edu/
CQPWeb EEBO-TCP, phase I (and many others) https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/
(Video guide to CQPWeb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yf1KxLOI8z8&list=PL2XtJIhhrHNTxjyZ5VSKUr0-4EuzJJDbe)
BYU Corpora front end to EEBO-TCP (*not completely full text but will be soon*) http://corpus.byu.edu/eebo

3 Other resources
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), http://estc.bl.uk/
Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) http://www.ustc.ac.uk/
Items in the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), via Hathitrust http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis;c=247770968
LUNA, Folger Library Digital Image Collection http://luna.folger.edu/
Internet Archive Books https://archive.org/details/early-european-books
The Folger Digital Anthology of Early Modern English Drama http://digitalanthology.folger.edu/

Sarah Werner’s compendium of resources, incl digitised early books http://sarahwerner.net/blog/a-compendium-of-resources/
Laura Estill’s Digital Renaissance wiki page covers online book catalogues, digitised facsimiles, early modern playtexts online, print and book history, etc http://digitalrenaissance.pbworks.com/w/page/54277828/EarlyModernDigitalResources
(see also her very thorough guide to manuscripts online http://manuscriptresearch.pbworks.com/w/page/48026041/FrontPage)
Claire M. L. Bourne’s Early Modern Plays on Stage & Page resource list: http://www.ofpilcrows.com/resources-early-modern-plays-page-and-stage

Large Digital Libraries of Pre-1800 Printed Books in Western Languages http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/6107864/
The University of Toronto has a large number of Continental Renaissance text-searchable books online http://link.library.utoronto.ca/booksonline/
30+ digitised STC titles at Penn (free to use, from their collection) http://franklin.library.upenn.edu/search.html?filter.library_facet.val=Rare%20Book%20and%20Manuscript%20Library&q=STC%20collection%20%22sceti%22&sort=publication_date_sort%20asc,%20title_sort%20asc

UCSB Broadside Ballads Archive http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/
Broadside Ballads Online http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/

A database of early modern printers & sellers culled from the eMOP source documents https://github.com/Early-Modern-OCR/ImprintDB
(And their mirror of the ECCO-TCP texts: https://github.com/Early-Modern-OCR/TCP-ECCO-texts)

Database of Early English Playbooks (DEEP) http://deep.sas.upenn.edu/

How to save and download pdfs from the Chadwyck EEBO Interface https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u2B_MagrPc

And a crucial read from Laura Mandell and Elizabeth Grumbach on the digital existence of ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online): http://src-online.ca/src/index.php/src/article/view/226/448

this page will update with more resources as they are available. email me with links: heathergfroehlich at gmail dot com // 15 Aug 2016