British Periodicals, 1600-1800: An Electronic Index This presentation would consist of two parts: 1) an introductory account of the history, development, and present status of this ongoing attempt to produce an electronic subject index to pre-1800 British periodicals; and 2) a demonstration of the CD-ROM disk, containing the 69 periodical
indexes currently entered into the database.
Just as modern periodicals reflect the entire scope of twentieth-century culture, so do pre-1800 British periodicals record the spectrum of seventeenth and eighteenth-century culture. These
early periodicals are gold mines of information relevant to that society's politics, religion, philosophy, the early progress of medicine and science, business and economic theory and practice, legal history, the state of education, social customs and practices, pastimes and entertainments, literature and the arts, etc. etc.
Yet, this immense body of information--hundreds of thousands of pages worth--remains an enormous, uncharted terrain. No tool exists to guide users through its
contents. Existing catalogues like the ESTC can direct us to libraries holding copies of the periodicals, but they can't tell us what's in them. A few dozen periodicals enjoy hard-copy indexes, but this number pales in view of the 1,000+ periodicals extant from the period. In effect, every student of the period is faced with the distressing fact that there is no single, comprehensive index to the contents of these periodicals. Any scholar attempting to discover references to his/her particular interest in these periodicals must wade through the texts of the originals (or microfilm copies), page-by-page, a tedious task with regularly frustrating results because of the sheer bulk of material. It's no surprise, then, that scholars of early modern British cultural history would warmly welcome an index to the contents of the age's periodicals.
In the early 1930s, the eminent scholar/collector James M. Osborn, of Yale (whose rare book and manuscript
collection would later become a major wing of the Beinecke
Library at Yale) set out to remedy this regrettable situation. He hired a handful of young British scholars to
Index periodicals both in the British Library and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, the two largest UK repositories of pre-1800 British periodicals. Osborn selected the list of titles to be indexed, instructed his indexers in the process, supplied preformatted 4" X 6" cards for recording data, and the project was launched.
The process required indexers to read every page of each periodical and, for each subject on a page, to fill out a preformatted card. In effect, Osborn's index was a true subject index, not merely a listing of the periodicals' tables of contents. A completed card recorded data for seven fields: subject, author, reprint data, title of periodical, date, page reference, and the library location of the copy indexed.
When World War II broke out and the project was perforce concluded, the indexers had produced indexes for well over two hundred periodicals. In the process of shipping the cards to Yale, however, many of the indexes went to the bottom of the Atlantic, the victims of German torpedoes. For almost forty years, the remnants of Osborn's dream lay untouched in the basement of the Beinecke Library. In the late 1970s, Osborn offered the entire collection to this writer, and, shortly after Osborn's death within the next year, the 80,000 index cards were transported to St. Louis, where, ever since, the collection has been lodged in heavy metal, file-card cabinets in my home office.
For more than twenty years, as time and funding have allowed, I've been turning these cards into a kind of periodical index Jim Osborn would never have imagined. An initial inventory showed that the collection contained indexes to the full runs of 136 periodicals, indexes to another twenty periodicals that needed only minor additiona, and fragmentary indexes to another forty-nine titles. Although, from the outset, my intention had been to supplement Osborn's indexes by indexing all extant British periodicals from the age, practicality required that the first stage of the project be limited to the 156 complete and near-complete indexes.