"We're aggressively expanding and enhancing our 19th century product offering, reinforcing our position as the premier research source," said David "Skip" Prichard, president of ProQuest Information and Learning. "The range of documents and sheer volume of content that ProQuest now holds - millions and millions of pages - is staggering, but the technological framework that surrounds that content makes it all completely accessible, completely organized and completely usable."
Upon completion, the new digital archive British Periodicals Collection I will offer immediate access to high-resolution facsimile page images and searchable full text from full runs of 160 periodicals in the UMI® Early British Periodicals microform collection spanning from the late 17th century to the early 19th century. The most recent release offers 70 key titles with precision searching by content type for advertisements, reviews, letters, poems, maps and illustrations; and detailed title histories with key editors and contributors.
The digital release of Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals includes more than 90,000 records from 45 important British periodicals. Indexed by scholars, this source adds valuable information by including author attributions for articles that were originally published anonymously or pseudonymously. This is the first web-based version of this famous scholarly index which was previously available in print or on CD-ROM. Wellesley can also be accessed within ProQuest's broader C19: The Nineteenth Century Index. All information on articles, contributors, pseudonyms and introductions about each periodical is fully searchable. For example, when cross-searching with ProQuest's British Periodicals, C19: The Nineteenth Century Index will deliver the breadth of a writer's work in full-text - even those pieces that originally appeared unsigned or over a pseudonym.
ProQuest's House of Commons Parliamentary Papers -- the most detailed primary source for the study of 19th century Britain, its colonies, and the wider world -- keeps growing. It now spans1801-1945, and by the end of 2006 there will be continuous full-text coverage from 1801-1978 and current content from 2004-2006. That's a total of 151,000 documents and over 7 million pages of full text.
The organizing force behind these products -and for 19th century content in general-is C19: The Nineteenth Century Index, a virtual road map to an entire century's worth of research material. ProQuest has expanded this popular finding tool to include two new sources: Poole's Index to Periodical Literature -- and records from American archival repositories. Poole's Index to Periodical Literature is the only systematic article-level index to the subject matter of 19th century periodicals. On completion in 1908, the Index had covered 482,000 articles and 378,000 subjects in 12,241 volumes of 479 British and American periodicals for the years 1802-1906. The addition of thousands of archive records allows C19 users to easily identify the location of 19th century primary sources held in archival collections across the United States.
ProQuest's 19th century collection features historical databases and literature collections, with materials supporting research in philosophy, history, science, fine arts, literature, and the social sciences. For more information visit ProQuest on the web at www.proquest.com or call 1-800-521-0600.
