The Internet Library of Early Journals (ILEJ) is a now completed test project to explore the feasibility and standards for digitizing limited sequential runs of eighteenth and nineteenth‐century British periodicals and mount them as viewable images on a free, searchable site. The Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Oxford undertook the project from 1996 until 1999, and have published their final technical report and declared the site closed; no further content will be added although the site still resides on the servers of the Oxford Bodleian Library. ILEJ is thus as much a historical record of digitization in the late 1990s as a historical record of the literature, social thought, and science of its time. This is digitization before XML and the emerging standards that are becoming so dominant in new efforts to create searchable texts. Nevertheless, ILEJ does offer a useful, free tool for scholars in subjects such as English literature and history, as well as historians of science and even historians of early electronic text projects.
The site consists of 20‐year digitized spans of six journals from the 1700s to the late 1880s. The dates of coverage vary, and the journals were selected based on their use by UK researchers in various humanistic and other disciplines. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (1843‐1863) and Notes and Queries (1849‐1869) are both well‐known literary and artistic journals heavily consulted by literary scholars. The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1757‐1777) is the pre‐eminent source for the study of eighteenth‐century scientific research in Britain. The Builder (1843‐1852) is a forum for architectural discussion and covers Victorian construction and design techniques. The two other eighteenth‐century titles, The Annual Register (1758‐1778) and Gentleman's Magazine (1731‐1750), provide a wealth of information about British politics, world events, and other details of places and peoples that historians frequently examine. The project developers decided that 20 years would give enough material to satisfy researchers and would offer enough experience to the digitization team to develop their techniques. Given the crumbling condition of printed copies of those journals available today, or the cumbersome alternative of microfilm, even these 20‐year cross‐sections are most welcome resources.
Users may browse all the available volumes and issues of the journals, but the developers have also created various search interfaces for Blackwood's, Notes and Queries, the Philosophical Transactions, and The Builder. The chosen spans of the journals were scanned and the searchable indexes created using OCR software. Because the ILEJ was primarily a pilot programme, not all the titles are fully searchable, and many can only be searched against broad subject (using their homegrown thesaurus), title, and author indexes. Blackwood's and Notes and Queries have full‐text searching available, but problems with the OCR process mean that some words could be misread. The search engine is rather simple, with two search boxes linked by either the Boolean AND or OR, and the * serves as the truncation symbol. There are five licenses of a “fuzzy” search option for selected titles, but this reviewer was unable to access that feature after several attempts in September and October 2003 (that search feature may no longer be available). The results list refers users to the volume, issue, and pages in the various issues of the journal. The actual pages are displayed in JPEG format, making an Adobe Acrobat Reader plug‐in unnecessary. There is a tool to resize the image size, and to navigate back one page or forward to the next page. Overall, the image quality is quite crisp and clear, more so than many PDF page images in other digitized historical collections. The JPEGs can take time to download on a slower connection, but can be saved or conveniently printed. Although the search interface is quite limited, it does provide several points of access into the material and requires little expertise in online database searching.
The ILEJ is perhaps the most user‐friendly digitization site available for historical collections of British periodicals. This reviewer has known of the site for several years and has referred humanities faculty and students to it, all of whom have reported favourably about its ease of use and content. Many of the microfilm packages of early periodicals and books being offered by the large commercial aggregators can cost upwards of half a million dollars, but the ILEJ is a wonderful, if small, free alternative for those interested only in certain titles. In addition, the final report and other documentation on the site can help libraries seeking to start their own e‐text projects with some of the basics, though it might be viewed as a historical document in its own right given the rise of new standards and practices in digitization. ILEJ may be a dead site, but the Bodleian has preserved it even though the original plan called for it to be alive only one year after the end of the project, but its ultimate future is not known. It is definitely a gem to bookmark and check often for all those in fields that rely on these important journals.
