What Serial Archives are listed in the Online Books Indexes

MAJOR SERIAL ARCHIVES LISTING CRITERIA

Along with books, The Online Books Page is also now listing major archives of serials (such as magazines, published journals, and newspapers). Serials can be at least as important as books in library research. Serials are often the first places that new research and scholarship appear. They are sources for firsthand accounts of contemporary events and commentary. They are also often the first (and sometimes the only) place that quality literature appears. (For those who might still quibble about serials being listed on a "books page", back issues of serials are often bound and reissed as hardbound "books".)

The Online Books Page lists serials in much the same way as it lists ordinary books. Serials appear in a special serials listing, but they also appear in the title, subject, and new items listings intermingled with books. They also have listing criteria similar to the listing criteria used for books. In particular:

The serial archives must be legitimately available at no charge. That is, they must be either in the public domain, or online with the permission of the applicable copyright holders. There must be no fee (or other consideration) required to access the contents of the serials, though ads may be included in the archives.
The serial must be significant. Serials listed must be carried and cataloged by a major library in order to qualify for listing. (Hence, most amateur 'zines do not qualify for listing here.) As I start listing serials, I may also give priority to serials I consider especially important.
The serial archives must be accessible and high-quality. Poorly done transcriptions, unreadable images, archives on unreliable Web servers, or archives that are too difficult for the average reader to navigate, may be omitted from my listings. Readers should at least be able to locate particular issues of serials, and then be able to go to any article in the serial.
The serial archives must be permanent, like they are in a library. (Some sites have full copies of previous issues, but only for a limited time period, and the issues disappear after the time period expires. Such archives normally do not qualify for listing.)
Complete contents of issues (or at least all of the major items in the issues) must be offered in the archives. (By this I mean the text of all the articles, not just table-of-contents listings.)
- Serial archives that omit syndicated or reprinted material because they do not have the copyright permissions to include them may, however, still qualify for listing, if the archive includes all of the serial's original material, and if this original material is the main content of the serial. (For example, a modern newspaper archive may be included for its original articles, even if the archive omits nationally syndicated columns, and stories provided by outside wire services, that appeared in the original print newspaper.) Omissions of this material will still be noted in cover page I provide for the archive, though.
There must be a significant run of the serial available online. I don't expect the entire run of a 150-year-old magazine to go online before I'll list it, but at the same time, it is not worthwhile to list single issues, for the most part. Generally, I require that at least one continuous year (12 months, or 52 weeks, or 365 days) of a serial be online before I'll list it in my main database. I may make exceptions for particularly significant serials for various reasons, such as their short lifetime (the entire run of The Germ, for instance, was only four issues). Serial projects with less than one year's worth of material, but that are continuing to grow towards that goal, may be listed in my in progress page.
As with the books I list, serials I list must be in English, or at least comprehensible to an English-speaking reader. (A serial that is mostly art, but with some foreign-language captions, for instance, could qualify, as might a serial with both English and foreign-language content.) Foreign-language serials are valuable as well, but I don't have the time to list them.
If there are multiple archives for a particular serial, I will generally link to all of the archives with significant amounts of material (under a single cover page), as long as the sum total of the archives' contents meet the criteria above.

There are many newspapers, magazines, and journals that have useful Web sites, but that do not have archives that qualify for the listings as I have specified above. While I do not have the time to list all of these Web sites on this page, there are other indexes that do list such sites. See, for instance, Yahoo's newspaper, magazine, and journal site listings.

If the serial in question is still being published, I will include a link to its official site, if any, even if that official site does not itself maintain a qualifying archive, as long as there is some qualifying archive for that serial somewhere on the Net.

I hope the index of major serial archives is a useful service for the Net. If you find it useful, please mail me when you learn of new major serial archives that I haven't listed yet.

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