The Value of the Online Edition Compared to Printed Volumes

      This first series of the publication was first available in a CD-ROM edition (1994), then in a cloth-bound paper edition consisting of ten volumes with about 1,000 pages per volume (1998). The current online edition has been informally available without charge since July 2001.  The current 20-volume print edition represents the state of the online edition as of September 2003.  However, the online edition is daily enlarged and corrected.  The completed five-series set is expected to consist of 50 volumes, with an incremental 25,000 titles in each series for a grand total of 125,000. In both the online and the paper editions, each subsequent series will be merged alphabetically with the entries from the previous series, making the previous obsolete. This plan of a multi-series cumulative publication has seemed beneficial on several counts, as explained in Section F below.

      The search facility of this online format is its chief strength. The five indexes, by Title, Place of Publication, Issuing Body, People and Subject, give much more rapid access than possible in print. But it is in the combination of search criteria, which is to say the elaborate tailoring of a search request to fit a researcher's most detailed inquiries, that the value of the search facility is most dramatic. For instance, one might ask for all publications in one subject area and one geographical area, within any time frame: all theatre journals in Liverpool during the 1860's, let us say. Or all children's periodicals published during the same year as Alice in Wonderland.

      The Specific Field Search and Global Search options allow readers to find titles or issuing bodies or names when they are not certain of the data they require. For instance, one might remember that a certain title contained the word Newcastle or Farm, which would be sufficient to find it using the Specific Field Search. Similarly, the Global Search option looks through most of the database for any one word or combination of words: NOT searched are the Locations, Price, Size, Indexes, Vol/Date, Circulation fields.

      Elaborate searches such as these might take up to fifteen seconds. In the printed volumes they would be impossible.

      Searches can also be refined, or completed in stages: first all the Women's journals, then all of those in the 1880's, then all of those in Essex, for instance. The Search History page, accessible by a button on each of the Index pages, records results of all searches for each session, and enables the results to be reviewed and printed. Moreover, the Search History button on the Search Results page records history of each session.

      Readers may print the results of each search either at the moment, or at the end of the session (from the Search History page).

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