Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Online Periodical Indexes - Maryland Historical Magazine

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Browsing through the blogs, I ran across a link to the Maryland Historical Society's web page for the online copies of the Maryland Historical Magazine for 1906 to 2005. These are in PDF format - each issue is one file. And freely accessible to any researcher.

On the Maryland Historical Society website, I had to sign up with an email address, name and postal contact information:




Once I was logged in (without a confirmation email), I saw the list of the issues of the Maryland Historical Magazine. There was a search box so I entered "mcknew" in the box and clicked on the gold arrow to the right of the box:




There were only two matches:




I clicked on the second one, and the issue containing the search term opened:



The issue opened on the front cover of the magazine. I could have scrolled up and down. I chose to search for "mcknew" in the search box for this issue and was quickly shown:



This is the index for Volume 58 in 1963, and it refers to Page 149 of this volume. That is not in this particular issue, because this issue contains the index for the volume.

I guessed that page 149 would be in Volume 58, Number 2 so I went back to the list of volumes and selected that issue. The page shows:





This is a wonderful resource for Maryland historians and genealogists. While the search engine is relatively primitive, it is functional and easily understood and used.

I was happy to find this - it's one good example for other genealogical and historical societies. Hooray for the Maryland Historical Society -- they understand that having a forward-looking and searcher friendly policy, relative to its complete magazine run, will lure more members and readers than hiding it behind a firewall.

1 comment:

Dr. Bill (William L.) Smith said...

Thank you, Randy.
My BRIGHTWELL ancestors appear 19 times... have to be some new information I don't have. Neat!

Bill ;-)