Historical E-Book/Digital Collections at the OSU Library: Sabin Americana, 1500-1926

Sabin Americana, 1500-1926 is an extensive digital collection from Gale/Cengage Learning that contains over 37,000 primary sources covering all aspects of life and culture in the Western Hemisphere.  It is based on the 29-volume bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America From its Discovery to the Present Time (Call # 015.73 S116d, 3rd floor) by Thomas Sabin (1821-1888).  A renowned 19th-century antiquarian book dealer, Sabin began compiling a bibliography of works about the Americas in 1868, and his monumental work was continued by others following his death and continued by the Bibliographical Society of America.  Sabin's bibliography was selective but focuses broadly on the history and civilizations of the Americas, and it offers a wealth of resources for the study of the rise and development of American culture from the European settlement to beginning of the twentieth century.

It includes books, periodicals, pamphlets, and other documents published both in Europe and the Americas on topics ranging from exploration, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the Western movement, Native Americans, military actions and many others.  Digitization is ongoing, and the publisher expects that the complete collection will eventually include 55,000 titles.

This database is of great value to students and researchers of American history, American studies, and related fields.  It has works in English as well as some works about the Americas in Spanish, French, Dutch, and other languages.

You will need to log in with your OSU email address and O-Key password to access Sabin off-campus.  Click HERE to log in.

Sabin Americana 1600-1926 is based on the 29-volume bibliography, Bibliotheca Americana: A Dictionary of Books Relating to America From its Discovery to the Present Time (Call # 015.73 S116d, 3rd floor) by Joseph Sabin (1821-1888).  A renowned 19th-century antiquarian book dealer, Sabin began compiling a bibliography of works about the Americas in 1868, and his monumental work was continued by others following his death and continued by the Bibliographical Society of America.  Sabin's bibliography was selective but focuses broadly on the history and civilizations of the Americas, and it offers a wealth of resources for the study of the rise and development of American culture from the European settlement to beginning of the twentieth century.

Sabin features both Basic and Advanced Search; you can search by keyword (significant fields of the record and metadata), author, title, subject, geographical subject, or search for keywords or phrases in the full text of the entire document.  Note:  "Full-Text" keyword searches include metadata not in the text of the publication; use "Main Text" or "Front Matter" to search for keywords in the body of the publications, or in the results list, use "Search this Work" to locate terms of phrases in a work..  You can also browse authors or works.  There are date limits, and additional limits to search illustration type, subject area, and language.  For full-text searching, the Fuzzy Search options look for near matches and variant spellings (including British spellings).

The truncation symbol (*) looks for multiple characters; the wildcard symbol (?) looks for one character. You can limit the search to Subject Areas such as Arts and Literature, Civil War, Colonization, Medicine, Religion, etc.

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Here is a search example. Let's say you want to find works in the Sabin collection on "Indian Territory" (Oklahoma in the nineteenth century) and then search inside those works for occurrences of "Cherokee."

First, to locate descriptions of Indian Territory from the 1800s, go to Advanced Search and use "Geographical Subject" and enter 1800-1900 in the Year(s) of Publication.

The results list consists of books from Sabin in which that phrase occurs.  The results have links to the Full Citation, the eTable of Contents of the book, List of Illustrations, and the Keyword in Context which displays a pop-up window with a brief preview of the passage in which the keyword or phrase appears.  You can mark titles to view as a Marked List for downloading, citing, and printing.  You can also sort results by author, title, date (descending or ascending).

When click on title in the results list, you reformat the view for reading.  The page image is displayed at 33% by default, but the size can be adjusted.  There in the upper right-hand section of the page are the icons to Print/View PDF which allows you to print the current page, entire document, or view/print up to 50 pages in PDF format.

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In the search for "Indian Territory" as a Geographical Subject in works published from 1800-1900, two works come up.  You can now search inside those works for the keyword "Cherokee." 

If you select one of the works, the Journal of the General Council of the Indian Territory (1871), click on the Search This Work button on the left-hand side of the page.  This feature allows you to search for words and phrases in the full text of the title:

The results screen will list all the pages on which the term "Cherokee" appears, and the term will be highlighted in green in the text.

As with ECCO, there are stop words (common words and parts of speech) that cannot be searched, and the software does not always recognize some of the characters used in early printed works (such as the "long s").