The Return of ESTC
For many members of the Bibliographical Society, the loss of the ESTC was one of the most keenly felt consequences of the cyber-attack on the British Library in 2023. After a few months the Print & Probability website at Carnegie Mellon University came to the rescue by making an old copy of the data available, which became more usable when information on library holdings was added to the bibliographic records. Functionality was basic, but the search results were delivered with lightning rapidity, an improvement on the BL system before the attack.
Now, after more than a year of hard work, the Consortium of European Research Libraries has released a new version of ESTC at datb.cerl.org/estc, which restores the 2023 data together with most of the search functionality of the BL version, combined with faster results and restoring of other useful tools.
The feature I have most missed is the ability to bring up a record for a particular book by simply adding the ESTC number to the end of the catalogue URL, and it is invaluable to be able to do this once again. Among other things, it has enabled my own library’s catalogue to reintroduce hyperlinks directly from the records for all pre-1801 English publications to their associated ESTC records, allowing users to see immediately whether the book is held elsewhere.
Nicolas Bell, President
