The History of the Waterloo Directories of the United Kingdom and Ireland Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900

      In 1976 appeared The Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900. This volume of 1,187 pages contains 28,995 brief entries gathered from a number of secondary sources, chiefly Times’ Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, the British Union Catalogue of Periodicals, the British Library Catalogue, Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory and the Union List of Serials (USA & Canada). At the time it was a breakthrough, for it demonstrated that at least 29,000 periodicals and newspapers had been published, in contrast to other estimates of the time, which were 13,000. The most accurate predictor turned out to be W.E.F. Fredeman, of the University of British Columbia, at 60,000. Professor Fredeman trained this editor in bibliographical method.

      In 1986 The Waterloo Directory of Irish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900, was published. Its 838 pages list 3,972 Irish titles, and includes indexes of people, places, issuing bodies and subjects. Work on the project was completed during a year as Senior Visiting Research Professor at Queen’s University, Belfast, with additional financial help from the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

      In 1989 The Waterloo Directory of Scottish Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900, was published in two volumes, the result of visiting more than eighty Scottish libraries. Over 2,200 it lists and indexes 7,320 titles, providing title pages for many.

      The first electronic version was the Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals, 1800-1900, Series 1, on CD-ROM in 1994. It listed 25,000 titles, with the convenience of electronic searching. A print edition in ten volumes was published in 1998. The current online edition, appearing in 2001 and since then greatly corrected and improved, contains all the data in both the Series 1 and Series 2 print editions.

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