The Library collection includes not only books, and non-print media (CDs, DVDs, etc.) but also journals and magazines. Journals and magazines are an important medium of written communication.
- Popular magazines inform or entertain general audiences on a wide variety of topics and interests (e.g., current news, computers, or cats).
- Professional journals and magazines report on news and current practices within specialized professions (e.g., teaching and education, or nursing and healthcare).
- Academic (or peer-reviewed) journals report on the results of research from various disciplines of scholarly study (e.g., Medieval history, physics, or Old Testament biblical studies).
The Library subscribes to many different journals and magazines of these various types, in both print and electronic formats. Until recently, if you wanted to find out what journals and magazines the Library held, you had to first browse a listing of print titles and then search for available titles in electronic full-text format. We are pleased to announce that you can now search for all the library’s journal and magazine holdings, in either print or electronic format, from a single location.
From the homepage of the Library website, click on the Electronic & Print Periodicals link. The link takes you to a journal search and browse service called Serials Solutions.
If, for example, you wanted to find Library holdings for the magazine Smithsonian, simply type the title in the “Find” box and click the “Search” button. The results indicate that we have holdings of Smithsonian in print and electronically in two online databases.
Although we observe that most users prefer to access journal articles electronically, don’t forget that print can still be very useful. Notice that our print holdings of Smithsonian stretch back to 1971, while our holdings in electronic format only go back to 1983. If your research required you to secure an article in an issue from 1979, you would not be able to get it in electronic format. But it is available in print! (Back issues of all our print periodicals can be found in the compact shelving in the basement level of the Library.)
We hope this one-stop interface will help to simplify your search for journals and magazines held by the Library. Remember that articles from journals or magazines not held by the Library in either print or electronic format can be requested from interlibrary loan by filling out the webform here.