Universal Short Title Catalogue: Open bibliography of early modern print culture
ustc.ac.uk
ustc.ac.uk
We are currently working on extending the USTC to 1700. Director Andrew Pettegree acknowledges that the end of the seventeenth century would be a far more logical end point for the USTC. “At the moment the survey concludes half way through the Dutch Golden Age, and misses the great flourishing of print in the France of Louis XIV and the expansion of the London press in the years after the Restoration. Incorporating the second half of the seventeenth century would also take in crucial developments in the history of the newspaper, science and the early Enlightenment. But it is a tough assignment: at this state in the development of the print industry, each fifty year extension potentially doubles the size of the resource. That’s a lot of staff time to gather and analyse the data.”
The USTC is the first ever search tool that allows you to search all books published in the first age of print, in England, France, Italy or any other part of the world where printing with moveable type is known. Developed over more than twenty years of research and analysis at the University of St Andrews, the USTC now contains information on the location of more than 4 million copies of books printed between 1450 and 1650, along with links to more than 250,000 full digital scans.