CERES Harvest
IV.iv
1.8.00

Early English Books Online Revisited
by Gavin Alexander
[A supplement to our review in Harvest 4.3]

EEBO has made great progress since our last review. More and more of the old UMI microfilms have now been scanned in, so that one tends no longer to find that an item is not yet available. To all intents and purposes this now is the complete digital collection of the books listed in STC and Wing. Teething troubles remain (see below) but the service has already changed the way we work.

ne feature of EEBO which we somehow neglected to applaud in our first review is the one which packages up a complete file of your chosen book for downloading in Adobe Acrobat format. This is a timesaving alternative to viewing, or printing off, page by page using the DJVU plugin. Adobe Acrobat is a viewer, rather like a web browser, and EEBO will direct you to a download site if you don't already have it on your computer. (If you do, it may not be the latest version, 4, and you may, as I did, have an afternoon of PC meltdown in store before you realise what the problem is). After searching, click to mark with a tick the book(s) you want. Then click on 'marked list' and you will be offered a full citation and the option - again click to select - of downloading all or a range of the book's scanned pages. On the next page you must enter your email address, so that EEBO can email you when the book is ready for downloading (this takes anything from a minute to half an hour). On the next page, you are given a temporary PIN number (right click to copy) and a link to ANOTHER page. Go there and enter the PIN (right click to paste) [and I do apologise to Mac users without right mouse buttons, as well as to sinistral PC users I suppose]. Click 'submit' and you get to a final page, which you can also reach via the link sent to you by email as notification that your order is being processed. This final page gives your order details, and is reloaded every minute until (and once) the file is ready, when the details turn into a hyperlink.

But before you click to download, a word of caution. Some files are as large as 50 megabytes. And at some times of the day heavy internet traffic causes problems, not least long download times. These are all reasons why something may go wrong, probably with your computer but occasionally at the other end. Whenever I download from EEBO I expect a crash. I try to avoid this by enlarging and emptying my browser cache (deleting everything that has piled up in \windows\temporary internet files and making the cache at least twice as large as the file to be downloaded). [Obviously I am again offending Mac users, but I doubt their machines crash, so they ought just to be happy.] By freeing up space in this way, I hope that my computer will get less confused when Windows tries to put copies of the download into temporary directories. Another thing I do is not click on the link to open the file straightaway, but save it to disk (by right clicking). A third thing I may do is close other open applications, including, after right clicking on the link to start the save process, my browser, since that is still trying to reload the download page every minute.

These cautions over, we can download our gleaming virtual early modern book and save it somewhere knowing that after a few years spent sweating in front of the computer it will be possible to do all our research on the beach with a laptop and a private archive of CDs. Or will it? The worst thing about this, the best of online services, is that sometimes a page blanks out half way down. Acrobat reader tells you 'read less image data than expected', because the problem is either with the file as EEBO sent it to you, or with the file as it emerged at the other end of the web. All you can do is go through the process again, and hope that this time it works. When it does, the results are satisfying. But be prepared for some occasional frustration.