The Enlightenment goes online this week thanks to a new service that allows academics electronic access to 138,000 works published between 1701 and 1800.
Among the 18th-century's literary and academic gems will be Dr Johnson's dictionary, 632 works by Jonathan Swift, and American President George Washington's resignation speech.
Direct access to facsimile copies of the titles as they were first published comes through the Joint Information Systems Committee, which runs information technology systems for further and higher education. Jisc recently bought Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Ecco) from the publisher Thomson Gale.
Ecco reproduces works held in the British Library and in other key collections in the UK and the US, which researchers can access for a "small" fee.
Sir Ron Cooke, Jisc chairman, said: "The search facilities allow scholars and students to locate works in a manner that has not previously been possible and opens up the 18th century."