I haven't done actual academic library research since college, going on 30 years ago now. So my question is, these days, how would I check to see what editions of a primary document may have been published (besides Amazon!) and what, if any, scholarship has been done on it? Not asking anyone to do my research, just asking what resources you would go to these days to look for something like that?

Additional info: I've been reading a relatively short book that was published in the 17th century, so it's written in early modern English, with all of the strange (to modern eyes) spellings, capitalizations, punctuation, etc. It's of historical interest and is sometimes assigned in classes (which is how I found it, as it was discussed in a free online class). The only e-book versions I found were bad scans with no correction of artifacts and misreadings by the scanner. So as I read, I found myself "translating" it into modern English and started a document with this "translation".

It occurs to me that this could be useful to others trying to read this document, particularly when reading for content. It would not take much work to finish my "translation" and turn it into a reasonably priced e-book uploaded to Amazon.

I'm debating adding some background material and footnotes as certain references have sent me down fascinating Google holes, but that would be a lot more work and not necessarily worth the time and effort for a little labor-of-love project.

At this point I would like to find out if anything like this has been done (it doesn't look like it based on what I've found through Amazon and basic Googling) but I want to make sure I'm covering all my bases, as well as see what scholars have had to say about this particular work.

Thanks for any help/advice, and apologies in advance if I'm not doing this right, I'm pretty new to reddit and have mostly been posting/commenting in the "fluffier" subreddits!