ResearchBuzz

The picture collection came out a while ago, but Google recently announced that the entire run of LIFE magazine — over 1800 issues from 1936 to 1972 — are now available on Google Books. I wish Google Books had some kind of nice-looking “splash URL” where you could start a browse of a digitized magazine, but you’ll have to start with http://books.google.com/books?id=R1cEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s#all_issues_anchor.

You can browse issues (and from the look of these early 70s covers, it’s really tempting) but you can also search by keyword. I did a search for computers and was a bit surprised to see over 250 results. Flipping through the results it looks like the earliest results are from the mid-1950s, but I’m not sure about that because I can’t find a way to sort my search results by issue date (AW C’MON GOOGLE!)

I picked an article from November 1957 and took a look. You view the magazine by pages, and sometimes the print makes that a little tough. But you can zoom, pan, etc.

One thing you might be surprised about is the fact that Google has apparently indexed the text of the ads as well as the articles. One of the tests I ran (“circuit board”) ended up finding a lot of ads for GE televisions — not quite what I expected. On the other hand, browsing these old magazines always gets me distracted by the old ads anyway. Keep an eye out for the enormous Sylvania “Slimline” televisions. (Buy a TV and get a free electric blanket!)

I feel like Google designs these scanned magazines more for browsing than for serious searching (you can’t sort results by date, you can’t search article text separately from ad text, etc.) but they ARE a fun browse. Worth a look.

The American Motorcyclist Association has put a 50+ year archive of its official publication, American Motorcyclist, up online. The archive spans from 1955 to 2007 (over 630 issues!) and is available through a partnership with Google Books.

The easy way is to go to http://books.google.com and search for American Motorcyclist. If you want a direct URL, though, try this giant link, which will start you at January 1955.

All issues are available for free and are available in full format, including ads and covers. The digitizing is excellent quality though you will have to zoom in to read many of the articles (unless you have spectacular eyes.) How great to read about the upcoming 1955 Daytona Beach Classic, and the ads! I think may favorite one is the full-pager that uses Annie Oakley to sell savings bonds. (The headline: “She shot the ashes off the Kaiser’s cigaret”.)

You can do searches of individual issues, of course, but doing full-archive searches is a little more tricky. I found appending “American Motorcyclist” to my search sort of worked, but in the experimental searches I ran I never felt like I was getting a realistic number of results. Do full-archive searches with caution.

That aspect of search is disappointing, but this archive is absolutely worth a look.

I’m very excited about this! Harper’s Magazine, which publishes the Harper’s Index, will put the past ten years of its Index up for free starting on February 15th.

Harper’s Web site is http://harpers.org/. There is, on the menu, a link to Harpers Index, but it’s only page thumbnails and then the notice that the content is only available for paid subscribers.

Keep an eye out! We’ll be seeing more content here in a couple weeks.