6 May

Periodicals

The landscape of non-book library materials has a broad variety of journals and magazines and other 'serials' --and no single way of interrogating the full range. Indeed, the riches at our disposal are so varied that even the guides are complicated by many choices, and the search interfaces are an even greater difficulty.

Books have the disadvantage of taking a relatively long time to produce (figure a year from completed manuscript to book-on-shelf, though some are faster and some slower), and lots of subjects 'happen' much more rapidly. In addition, the kind of communication that an "article" can accomplish is different from that of a book, obvious in the sciences where current information is especially valuable.

So what are the tools at our fingertips, and how shall we choose among them?

The Library has subscriptions to MANY periodicals, some print-only, some online-only, and some in both formats. They are listed in Annie --so a TITLE search in Annie will reveal if we have a particular title, what our holdings are, and even when the latest issue was received and the next is expected. There's a list of journal titles assigned to departments (mostly for budgetary purposes).
??where are the 'backfiles' of journals?? and ??what about 'current' issues??

There are electronic archives of quite a few periodicals, most of which are licensed (and so not accessible except via a W&L login). Some of these are potentially very important, and becoming more so as more titles are added. The main example for East Asian Studies is JSTOR, which has and Asian Studies collection. What's especially important about electronic archives is that they are searchable in ways that print versions of the same titles aren't. Thus, I can do a search in that Asian Studies collection for full-text occurrence of "nuclear weapons" AND "north korea" and get nearly 200 hits... and discover that the first occurrence is from 1957... A search for 'influenza' gets 58 hits. And so on. And one can retrieve the full text immediately.
Many journals maintain their own electronic archives, though most contain less than 10 years of backfile.

As for general searching tools in the realm of journals and periodicals:
The Library's collection of Research Resources covers a lot of the territory, especially under the Periodical Indexes heading.
Consider Bibliography of Asian Studies, but also Historical Abstracts ...and American Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (ABSEES) turns out to be useful for Carolyn's topic ...point being, it's wise to look in multiple places

Newspapers and newsmagazines are something of a special case. For many purposes, LexisNexis is especially valuable. World News Connection and Dow Jones Interactive are also useful.