Really Early Journals

Looking for 18th and 19th century journals? Check out The Internet Library of Early Journals at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/ . This site is a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester and Oxford. The goal is to digitize "substantial runs" of 18th and 19th century journals, and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data.

Journals include: Gentleman's Magazine, The Annual Register, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Notes and Queries, The Builder, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. You can currently search on Blackwood's, Gentleman's, Notes and Queries, and Philosophical Transaction. Each title is separately searchable.

Searching is very basic -- a couple of query boxes and a Boolean connector. Searching Gentleman's for "shipping" found seven results. Results include the date and volume of the issue and the phrase containing your keyword. Click on the date of the issue and you'll be given a picture of the relevant page. Icons on the top left of the page allow you to flip back and forth or zoom in on a page. I found the pages much more readable than I would have expected, though occasionally page fade makes reading almost impossible. (The page fade on the pages I saw appears to be mostly on the lower right.)

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