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Frequently Asked Questions

The responses below are designed to supplement our Tutorial Videos, introducing some of the key terms used in the database, and explaining how our data has been sourced, structured and categorised. We will continue to add material to this explanatory guide as we learn more about how different kinds of users are interacting with the resource: if you have a question that is not yet addressed here, please let us know using the Contact page on this website.

Although the database allows users to look at subscription library membership, holding and borrowing patterns in unprecedented detail, the information we hold varies hugely from library to library, and can be both complex and frustrating. Users are strongly advised to read through all of the responses to help them understand what the resource says – and, as importantly, what it does not say – about reading habits in late eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland and North America.

What kind of information does the database provide?

The database provides information on membership records, collecting habits and book borrowing patterns at membership subscription libraries across North America and the British Isles between 1731 and 1800. This includes details of specific books borrowed by named individuals at the handful of libraries for which borrowing records survive, together with catalogue and membership records for around 80 further libraries, as well as additional information about books, authors, library members and their wider social and family networks.

Once you enter the database, the Rank Libraries table provides a snapshot of what information we hold on each of the featured libraries, in addition to general background information on each library. For the Lewes Library Society, for example, the Rank Libraries table shows that the database includes information on 29 members, 76 books held by the Library and 863 borrowing events. For the Stranraer Library, on the other hand, the only information captured by the database relates to the 35 books held by this library. This does not mean that the Stranraer Library had no members and never lent any books; rather, it indicates that we lack this information, in this case because surviving documents relating to this library do not provide lists of members or book borrowings.

How can I use the database in my research?

We hope that the database will be useful for scholars from a wide range of disciplines studying the circulation and reception of eighteenth-century texts. The database provides extensive information on the dissemination of texts in literature, political science, economics, philosophy, area studies (including French, German, Italian and Hispanic Studies) and history (including histories of science, technology, medicine, race, empire, religion, ideas, politics, gender and education), identifying not only the libraries that owned copies of these works, but in many cases some of the specific readers who borrowed them. We also expect the database to be of specific use to researchers interested in book history, library history and the history of reading. The database has been designed from the outset to be scalable in the future to other types of libraries, in other places and other time periods: if you are interested in collaborating with us on future projects, please do get in touch.

How can I use the database in my teaching?

The database is already being used by the team to support university provision in the USA, Australia and the UK in courses on the history of books and publishing, eighteenth-century literature, and the history of the Age of Enlightenment and Revolutions. The database provides detailed contextualised information on the circulation of set texts in the UK national curriculum at A-Level, including texts by authors such as Locke, Wollstonecraft and Rousseau (Politics), Hume and Kant (Philosophy), and Defoe, Radcliffe and Goldsmith (English). If you have developed creative ways to integrate our resource into your classroom activities, or would be interested in working with us in developing teaching materials for use in schools or universities, we would love to hear from you.

What can the database not tell me?

Although the database helps users track the movement of books across the British Isles and North America, and (for the small number of libraries for which such records survives) allows us to place specific books in named borrowers’ hands, it does not tell us anything about how those borrowers engaged with those books – whether they enjoyed the stories the author told, or how far they agreed with (or understood!) the main arguments. It does not even tell us how much of the book they actually read – or if they read it at all! – Although the fact that some readers returned to borrow the same title multiple times must say something about how interested they were in that book’s contents.

The social and geographical reach of membership libraries was also limited; some of these institutions were designed to be socially exclusive, with high membership fees and annual subscriptions pricing out all but the most wealthy of urban elites, although many other libraries adopted more affordable pricing structures that extended the reach of books to less affluent town-dwellers such as innkeepers, tailors, cartwrights, haberdashers and millers. Other types of source material are required to access the reading experiences of those readers generally excluded from membership libraries on the basis of class, purchasing power, race and ethnicity, together with those often excluded on the basis of gender.

What period does the database cover?

The database starts with the foundation of the first formal subscription library in 1731, the Library Company of Philadelphia. The database currently ends in 1800, mainly for pragmatic reasons; in utilising the University of Helsinki’s enriched metadata from the English Short Title Catalogue to collate and standardise information of books, we have followed ESTC’s end date of 1800. We recognise that this is an arbitrary cut-off point, however, and are currently exploring ways of extending the database into the nineteenth century.

What primary sources did the research team use to compile the database?

Every library record in the database lists original sources used in compiling data on that specific library, including manuscript material and where that is held. Library records also note where digital surrogates of printed material are accessible via subscription services, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) or Early American Imprints (EAI).

What other sources did the research team use to compile the database?

Every library record identifies key secondary sources that we have found to be particularly useful for that library, in addition to material published by our own research team. A very wide range of primary and secondary sources have been used to collate basic biographical information on library members, including eighteenth-century commercial directories and genealogy websites; a full list of these sources is in development and will be posted on this website in due course. Our Further reading page lists key works, together with publications by members of the project team.

What should I do if I spot any mistakes?

If you have spotted any errors (whether typographical or factual), please let us know using the Contact page on this website. Likewise, we would love to hear from you if you have specific information about any of the libraries or library members listed in this database (for instance, where you believe we may have incorrectly identified a library member).

How can I find out about the latest updates?

A summary list of database contents, together with data updates listing the latest additions to the database with the date of upload, will be posted to our Citing the database page as these become available.

We expect the database to continue to grow in the coming years, completing our set of borrowing records from Burlington and adding further sets from Salem, the Redwood Library in Rhode Island, Philadelphia, Selkirk and elsewhere. We also plan to continue to add further libraries to our collection of library holdings records, extending the reach of the database into the very largest urban subscription libraries that are currently underrepresented due to the sheer time and resources needed to collate libraries of more than 2000 books (including Leeds, Hull and Charleston).

We will continue to collate information on library members, and we also have long-term plans to introduce other types of library – including commercial circulating libraries and English cathedral libraries, for which outstanding borrowing records survive. If you would be interested in collaborating with us on any of these future plans, please get in touch through our Contact page.

What type of library does the database describe?

The database deals specifically with subscription libraries, variously called proprietary libraries, library companies, union libraries, public libraries or, particularly in North America, social libraries. Unhelpfully (for us!), some of these institutions (such as in Leeds and Halifax) also called themselves circulating libraries, although scholars tend to use this term to describe commercial book-lending businesses against which membership libraries often defined themselves. The defining feature of these libraries was that they were membership libraries, each of which charged an entrance fee and an annual membership fee (or subscription) for a shared stake in the library’s management, access to its collections, and (often) joint ownership of the library’s books and material collections.

Were there other types of library in the eighteenth century? How can I find out more about them?

Public libraries as we would recognise them today – taxpayer-funded, and providing books without charge to the whole community – did not exist until the mid-nineteenth century. Before then, books could be borrowed from many different sources including cathedrals, churches, chapels and other religious communities; schools and universities; specialist professional libraries operated by lawyers, medics and others; commercial circulating libraries, which rented out books by the day, week or month without requiring membership; and charitably endowed libraries, such as Marsh’s Library in Dublin, Chetham’s Library in Manchester, the Leighton Library in Dunblane and The Library of Innerpeffray near Crieff.

Permanent membership libraries of the kind showcased in our database often grew out of more informal book clubs or reading societies, in which books typically circulated through the membership by rotation and were auctioned off (or shared out amongst members) at the end of each year. It was also quite common at this time for book owners to lend out their books to relations, friends, neighbours and the wider community (including, in some documented cases, domestic servants and estate workers). You can find further information on these libraries’ histories in the Further reading section of this website.

For Scotland, examples of many of these types of library are offered by our friends and collaborators at Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers. This resource includes the borrowing records of the Selkirk Subscription Library between 1799 and 1814 compiled by our PI, but not yet included in ECLO. Further contextual information is provided by the MEDIATE Database (Measuring Enlightenment: Disseminating Ideas, Authors, and Texts in Europe, 1665-1830) and the BIBLIO Database (Bibliography of Individually-owned Book and Library Inventories Online, 1665-1830).

How can I find out which subscription libraries the database includes? Were there subscription libraries that have not been included in the database?

A full list of subscription libraries featured in the database can be accessed through the Rank Libraries table. Scholars have found reference to around 300 further membership libraries across North America and the British Isles before 1800, although no direct documentation for these in the form of printed catalogues or manuscript library records (lending records, minute books, etc.) survives.

Why do some libraries have no borrowings?

Several of the libraries in our database were designed to be reference only, where books were not permitted to be taken out (such as the Liverpool Athenaeum, founded in 1797), but almost all of them allowed subscribers (and often other members of their household) to borrow books. Handwritten records would have been kept of these borrowings, but almost all of these have been lost over time – whether disposed of when a library closed down, destroyed by damp, mould or fire, or perhaps even lying undiscovered to this day amidst family papers held by members’ descendants.

In fact, borrowing records survive for fewer than ten subscription libraries across North America and the British Isles. We have collated records from six of these so far (with smaller runs still to be added for Salem, Philadelphia and the Redwood Library, Rhode Island), but where a library described in the database does not include borrowings, this usually means that its records do not survive. It does not mean that no one borrowed any of its books!

This also means that the borrowing patterns captured by our resource inevitably reflect local trends and priorities at the six libraries for which such records survive; they can be used to develop hypotheses about what people were interested in reading at this time across North America and the British Isles, but only if the limitations of the source base are properly recognised and local circumstances factored into the analysis. For examples about how our borrowing records can be used, visitors are encouraged to read some of the publications arising from the project, listed under the Further reading section of this website.

 

Do any of these subscription libraries still exist?

A very small number of subscription libraries from the period covered by the database continue to exist, many of which were project partners. Surviving institutions in Britain include the Leeds Library, the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, the Liverpool Athenaeum, the Tavistock Subscription Library and the Wanlockhead and Leadhills Miners’ Libraries, while several others were incorporated into other kinds of institutions (like the Birmingham Library, which is now part of the Birmingham and Midland Institute). These libraries are all part of the Independent Libraries Association, which also includes a number of nineteenth-century subscription libraries that do not fall within our current date range. In the USA, surviving institutions include the Library Company of Burlington, Charleston Library Society, Union Library of Hatboro, New York Society Library and Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island.

What is the difference between an edition, a book and a work?

Our databases use a hierarchical structure to describe and organise books. This consists of four levels – works (defined by professional bibliographers as a “distinct intellectual or artistic creation”, such as Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire);  editions (defined as “the specific intellectual or artistic form that a work takes each time it is ‘realised’”, such as the 2nd edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall); holdings (or the precise copy of an edition held by one of our libraries); and volumes (which form part of a multi-volume holding).

When users see the word “book” in our database, we describe the work in this hierarchy. The ranking tables count all appearances of a specific work either within borrowing records or catalogues, allowing users a global snapshot of the circulation of that work regardless of edition, holding or volume. Work records within the database list which libraries held a copy (or holding) and the various editions of that work that appear in the database. Borrowing records are linked to specific volumes, to show which volumes of that library’s holding were borrowed.

Much of this hierarchy is hidden ‘under the bonnet’ of the public database because subscription library catalogues do not follow modern, professional cataloguing standards – they often left out crucial details (e.g. publication place and date) or presented incorrect (and sometimes erroneous) information which has made the task of linking a specific holding to a specific, verifiable edition of that work challenging and occasionally impossible. Advanced users who want to know more about the link between works, editions and holdings will need to contact us to request access to the back-end, where these relationships are fully articulated and where users can access (and assess) our confidence in associating editions with holdings. 

What is the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC)? Where does the ESTC link take me? Why do some editions not have an ESTC link?

The ESTC – or English Short Title Catalogue – is a union catalogue that describes all printed objects produced in the English-speaking world before 1801. It currently contains about 500,000 edition records reflecting more than 3 million holdings in rare books libraries and other collections across the world today.

We used metadata from the ESTC which had previously been cleaned, enriched and sorted into works by researchers at the Computational History Group at the University of Helsinki to populate bibliographical records within our database. When our team members wanted to add a new holding record to the database, an automated system would look for that record within Helsinki’s enriched ESTC metadata and copy across bibliographical information for the edition we identified as the closest match.

This helped us populate bibliographical information and formal linkages between holdings, editions and works, dramatically increasing the speed of data entry and allowing us to cover much more ground than would otherwise have been possible. The ESTC link associated with each edition listed in the database will take users to the ESTC page for that edition.

How did the research team behind the database decide which categories to use for books?

Categorising eighteenth-century books is a complicated process, not least because many of the modern disciplines – such as History, Literature and the Social Sciences – that underpin modern library classification systems (such as Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress) did not coalesce until at least the mid-nineteenth century.

Before then, there was considerable fluidity in form and genre, with some works pointing in several different ways at the same time. Yet we recognised at an early stage that users would want to be able to compare and contrast circulation patterns between different types of books – between Fiction and Non-Fiction, for example, or to trace long-term trends within specific genres (Sermons, for example, or Drama).

We therefore adopted the taxonomy developed by our friends and colleagues at Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers, which suited our needs well and had the additional benefit of facilitating interoperability between our two datasets from the outset. For further discussion, see “Some Notes on Book Hierarchies and Genre Classification” by our Co-Investigator Professor Matthew Sangster, who held a similar role on Books and Borrowing and provided a formal hinge between the two projects.

Why do the ranking tables allow users to sort the popularity of books in three different ways – “Held in # Libraries”, “Times Borrowed” and “Unique Borrowers”?

The database allows comparison across two fundamentally different kinds of record – library catalogues (which record when a library held a specific book, but say nothing about how frequently – or otherwise – that book might have been borrowed) and borrowing records.

To calculate how many times each book was borrowed, each volume is treated as a separate item. If a single reader borrowed every volume of a 6-volume copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, this is counted 6 times under “Times Borrowed” but only once under “Unique Borrowers”. With many eighteenth-century books appearing in multi-volume sets, counting borrowings in two separate ways helps us to mitigate any potential skew towards books that were published in multi-volume sets and therefore needed to be borrowed multiple times by a single unique borrower to complete.

What are “Agents”, and what do the icons mean when searching for Agents in Simple Search?

The database system we have used (designed by Heurist) uses the term “Agent” simply to describe any person in the database.

When searching for agents in Simple Search, the results list uses two icons to help users quickly distinguish between agents who were authors and those who were library members.

A quill icon denotes an author, and a pile of books denotes a library member. Some agents – such as Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke and William Enfield – have both, because they were both authors and library members.

Agents who do not have an icon were neither authors nor library members; they are usually included in the database as associates of library members (e.g. family members, business partners, professional contacts, etc.).

Why do some agent records provide many biographical details

Although some library members were significant historical personalities about whom very detailed biographical information is readily available (such as Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, both members of the New York Society Library in the 1790s), library subscribers tended to be fairly ordinary people – merchants, manufacturers, artisans, farmers, clergymen, lawyers, doctors, middle ranking military officers and their families – who did not necessarily leave very many traces in the documentary record.

With historical information on the vast majority of library members being difficult and often exceptionally challenging to track down, relying on meticulous and time-consuming research in archival repositories, there were limits to how much we could find out during the four years of funding.

The project team therefore made the difficult decision from the outset to prioritise biographical research for those libraries with whom we were partnering and for those libraries for which borrowing records survive. For other libraries, we sought as a minimum to collate the names of library members (where given) and to present biographical information provided in library documentation (which usually includes prefixes and suffixes, and sometimes provides occupations), while also undertaking systematic searches for named individuals within contemporary commercial directories.

This means that there is still plenty of more detailed research to do, and the project will continue to search for information on members’ lives, adding this information to the database in future updates listed on the Citing the database page.

We recognise that family historians and genealogists do very valuable research in this space; if you find any of your ancestors in the database, or have any further information about any of our agents that you would be willing to share, please do let us know.

Why does the database describe library members’ occupations in three different ways?

Historical occupations are notoriously difficult to pin down, and we wanted to describe our library members’ occupations in a way that was as useful as possible. We have therefore described occupations in three related ways.

“Attested Occupation” reflects how library members described themselves in library records, or how they were described (or “attested” in contemporaneous documentation – whether that be in printed subscriber lists attached to published library catalogues or in contemporary city directories (the equivalent of the eighteenth-century Yellow Pages).

To account for the considerable variety (and creativity) with which members’ occupations were described by contemporaries, we have sorted all of these into a set of “Standardised Occupations”, which allow users to analyse membership and borrowing patterns across individuals who shared broadly similar occupations – however they chose to describe those occupations.

Finally, we have organised these “Standardised Occupations” into one of 14 “Occupational Areas”, which are pots designed to bring together individuals who were operating within the same economic sectors (broadly defined) allowing comparison between individuals who worked in “Law” with those who worked in “Health and Medicine”, and those who worked in “Commerce, Trade and Finance” with those work worked in “Education” or in the “Agricultural” sector. To facilitate interoperability once again, we collaborated closely with our friends and colleagues at Books and Borrowing 1750-1830: An Analysis of Scottish Borrowers’ Registers to ensure that our approach was as robust and useful as possible.

Were subscription libraries open to women?

This is one of the questions we get asked most frequently when we speak about the project, no matter the audience! While scholars have traditionally believed that these libraries were primarily – if not almost exclusively – masculine spaces, our research shows that they played a very significant role in facilitating the circulation of women’s writing and in extending women readers’ access to print.

Many women joined subscription libraries as subscribers in their own right, while others can be shown to have made fulsome use of shares inherited from a deceased husband, father or other male relative or guardian. There is also strong evidence to suggest that women readily had access to library books borrowed under a male relative’s subscription, not least because the contemporary law of couverture dictated that property (as conveyed in this instance by an equal share in the value of a library’s books) should be held entirely under a man’s name.

For more information on women readers (and women writers, who were an increasingly prominent force in the literary marketplace as our period developed), you can ebrowse our website.