Fast Facts
Free up shelf space with comprehensive collections
Overview
Humanities content remains relevant and influential. Now more than ever, scholars and students need access to decades of sweeping digital content and features that enhance their studies. Cross-search with other digital primary-source content including historical newspapers, magazine archives and government documents for an expanded field of inquiry.
Meet demand for different types of content
Historical Periodicals are among the Top 10 most used content types according to a ProQuest Survey. Faculty encourage students to use different content types and primary source materials are recommended to support the development of critical thinking skills.
Reclaim valuable space in your library
Physical archives take up a lot of space which is in-demand to fulfill the evolving needs of library users. Digitized collections not only preserve the quality the fragile materials and free up shelf space but are often more comprehensive, spanning the entirety of a titles’s run, from the first issue to that last published.
P to E
As libraries and campus have needed to close their doors, the need for robust digital resources is critical to support distance teaching, research and learning. Replacing currently inaccessible materials with electronic versions minimizes the disruption shifting to online-only environments.
Periodicals Archive Online
This cross-disciplinary content, spanning 15M pages, 770 journal backfiles and three centuries of scholarship, supports studies of the arts, humanities and social sciences to surface key research material and inspire serendipitous discovery of information and insights that might not otherwise be uncovered.
American Periodicals, British Periodicals
The wide cross-section of periodical types in these collections reveal various perspectives, biases and developments over three centuries for comprehensive research into countless topics spanning history, arts, politics and society over three centuries.
In American Periodicals, over 1,500 publications reflect two centuries of American – and world – history and culture. They provide insights into key periods and events including the transition from colonial times to independence, through to the emergence of modern America.
The British Periodicals collections comprise nearly 500 publications published from the late-17th to the 21st centuries and encompass almost every variety of periodical, from magisterial quarterlies and professional organs, through to penny weeklies, illustrated family magazines, and coterie art periodicals.
Subject-Specific Collections
Thematic collections of consumer/trade magazine backfiles covering entertainment / popular culture, LGBTQ topics, fashion, and more support the acute need for primary source materials in emerging subject areas where print editions are hard to access and traditional scholarly sources are limited. They also often contain cross-disciplinary content that offers unique insights and information in a variety of subject areas. Examples of some topics that are covered in these discipline-specific collections include the study of education, religion, women’s history, LGBTQ issues, fashion, design and photography, health and fitness and much more!
Analysis of dissertations and scholarly journal usage on the ProQuest platform reveals a high demand for historical periodical databases:
- From January 2008 to June 2018, over 260,000 dissertations or scholarly journal articles on the ProQuest platform cited at least one publication from the Historical Periodicals collections analyzed.*
- Dissertations and articles that cited these publications spanned 357 subject areas; 43% of these outputs citied a periodical not directly associated with the researchers’ subject area.
- Periodicals Archive Online was cited more than twice as often as the historical NYT
- Education Magazine Archive was cited nearly twice as often as the historical Guardian and The Observer
- For scholarly research on the topic of Education, titles within the Education Magazine Archive was cited in almost 80% of those research outputs
- Researchers engaging with new technologies such as text and data mining require a large body of historical content to investigate – Historical Periodicals can uniquely satisfy this emerging need.
- In 2014, Librarian for Digital Humanities Research Peter Leonard and Public Services Librarian Lindsay King released results from an ongoing project that employed data mining tools in the analysis of Vogue magazine’s sprawling digital archives. "The Vogue project occurred because ProQuest, a library resource to which Yale has a perpetual access license, unveiled the entire archive of Vogue — spanning 122 years — for online access in 2011", King said. "Beyond insights into fashion and culture, the project is just one example of how to best implement digital technology to answer humanities-based research questions", Leonard said. Learn more here.
*13 Historical Periodicals collections or stand-alone titles were analyzed
Related Products
Periodicals Archive Online
Periodicals Archive Online connects researchers with a rich digital archive of leading international journals in the humanities and social sciences from the past 200 years, to improve research outcomes in multiple disciplines.
LGBT Magazine Archive
LGBT Magazine Archive traces the history and evolution of myriad aspects of LGBT history and culture, including legal contexts, health, lifestyle, politics, social attitudes, activism, gay rights, and arts/literature.
British Periodicals
Offering comprehensive full-run coverage for popular periodicals, this growing resource will offer facsimile page images and searchable full text for nearly 500 British periodicals published from the seventeenth through the early twentieth centuries, totaling almost five million pages.
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