Accessing and preserving the past: PCI and JSTOR

Several collaborative efforts between publishers and libraries are under way to meet scholars' need for improved indexing of older serial literature and to solve library preservation concerns.

Periodicals Contents Index (PCI) http://pci.chadwyck.com/ is one of the most ambitious of these efforts; its goal is to provide access to tables of contents for thousands of humanities and social-sciences publications, some dating as far back as the 1770s.

While PCI does not provide full-text articles, it does provide unparalleled retrospective bibliographic access to historical journal collections. Journals indexed in PCI fall into 23 rough subject areas­from archaeology and architecture to political science and psychology­and include titles published in the United States, Great Britain, and Western Europe. For a list of journals covered, see http://pci.chadwyck.com/titles/titles.html.

Until now, indexing of these journals has been provided in diverse print and online indexes, if at all, with many indexes only beginning coverage in the 1920s or 1930s. PCI covers journals from their first issues (many of which appeared in the early 19th century) through 1990/91. You can search by author, title, keyword, type of article, language, or year. PCI is an invaluable source for book-review citations, and for tracing contemporary reactions to new schools of thought across the disciplines. If only PCI were full text!

Happily, there's JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/ which, while a much smaller effort than PCI, provides the full text of journals' contents. JSTOR allows you to search for and read the full text of articles from the first issues of a journal through issues published three to five years ago. You can search by author, title, keyword within full text, dates or type of article. And since JSTOR is an image-based database, you get a faithful replication of original material, and the unique structure of each journal title is maintained (including thematic groupings, special supplements, book reviews, editorial statements and policies, advertisements etc.).

JSTOR constantly is expanding its holdings­to check titles covered, go to http://www.jstor.org/cgi-bin/jstor/listjournal. Individual journal title entries in the Web version of the UB Libraries catalog also provide a direct link to the digital JSTOR files.

For assistance in connecting to the World Wide Web, contact the CIT Help Desk at 645-3542.

-Austin Booth and Nina Cascio, University Libraries.