MAJOR SERIAL ARCHIVES LISTING CRITERIA
Along with books, The Online
Books Page also lists 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 literary works appear. (For those who might still quibble
about serials being listed on a "books page", back issues of serials are
often bound and reissued 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,
unless they've made it into a major library collection.)
- The serial archives must be accessible and reliable.
(Reliability here refers to the digital data and services, not to the
content of the serial itself).
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
our 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 a 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 one
of the following:
- At least one continuous year (12 months, or 52 weeks, or 365 days) of full issues.
- Or, for serials that ended before publishing a full year but meet our general significance criteria, the complete run of the serial.
- Or, for historic serials that qualify for inclusion in our
first copyright renewals for periodicals listings (generally, serials from the US that published between 1924 and 1963), at least one full issue.
Serial projects with less than the required amount of material, but
that have at least one full issue and are continuing to grow towards
our minimum run requirement, may be listed in
my in-progress page when suggested
by readers.
- As with the books I list, serials generally need to be in a language
I can decipher for me to give them a curated listing. (In practice, this
means something that uses a European script, whether the Latin alphabet,
Greek, or Cyrillic). English-language serials are the easiest for me
to work with, but I can often work out other languages, though it may
sometimes take me a while to process these.
- 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.
If a serial I list 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 let me know
when you learn of
new major serial archives that I haven't listed yet.
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Edited by John Mark Ockerbloom (onlinebooks@pobox.upenn.edu)
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