ProQuest launches British Periodicals, containing landmark British texts from across four centuries
In May, ProQuest Information and Learning will launch the first phase of British Periodicals, a suite of new digital collections that will ultimately offer researchers facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the late 17th century to early 20th - a total of around six million pages.
British Periodicals Collection I will consist of over 160 periodicals from the UMI® Early British Periodicals collection that detail life between the late 17th and early 20th centuries . These titles support the research needs of multiple departments, touching on diverse topics like history, literature, slavery, psychology, popular science, Celtic folklore, and religion.
British Periodicals will be accessible via ProQuest's acclaimed Periodicals Archive Online interface, where it is fully cross-searchable with other Periodicals Archive Online content in institutions with access to both resources. From September 2006 users of British Periodicals will also have the option of accessing the collection via its own dedicated standalone interface, which will feature additional functionality designed to enhance the experience of searching and browsing historical periodicals.
Institutions with access to ProQuest Information and Learning's edition of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals will be able to cross-search Wellesley indexing with British Periodicals full text using this standalone interface. Crucially, the addition of Wellesley will make it possible to search for instances of a word or phrase in a given author's contributions to periodicals even where these originally appeared unsigned or over a pseudonym.
All of this content will be available in full page image with searchable full text. Users can filter results down to article type and download articles in either PDF or TIFF. Each facsimile page will be available in both a high resolution bitonal version, for ease of on-screen reading, and in a high resolution grayscale version, providing scholars with an authentic and detailed record of the printed source.
British Periodicals consists of two separate collections, British Periodicals Collection I and British Periodicals Collection II.
- British Periodicals Collection I consists of more than 160 journals that comprise the UMI microfilm collection Early British Periodicals, the equivalent of 5,238 printed volumes containing approximately 3.1 million pages. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences.
- British Periodicals Collection II, scheduled for release in 2007, will consist of more than 300 journals from the UMI microfilm collections English Literary Periodicals and British Periodicals in the Creative Arts together with additional titles, amounting to almost 3 million pages. Topics covered will include literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.
By providing digital access to the key titles from this time period, British Periodicals opens up research to a much wider audience. This uniquely powerful multidisciplinary database finally gives students and researchers a clear pathway to detailed and exhaustive content previously unavailable online.
British Periodicals also offers a level of access not available from print and microfilm, making it easy for them to relive discoveries in art, history, literature, philosophy, and science, all with the much-needed context only first-hand accounts can provide.
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