EBSCO’s Magazine Archives

CONTENT EBSCO’s Magazine Archives provide access to 20 magazines, from business- and finance-related publications to periodicals focusing on literature, politics, and current events. Spotlighted here are four broad-interest magazines within the archive: Life, Maclean’s, People, and Vanity Fair. Content for each magazine is cover-to-cover, including advertisements, editorials, pictures, and full-text articles, from the first issue through the early 2000s: 2,200 issues of Life from 1936 to 2000; 3,300 issues of Maclean’s from 1905 to 2015; 1,300 issues of People from 1974 to 2000; and 670 issues of Vanity Fair from its first run (1913–36) and its relaunch (1983–2015). Maclean’s also includes predecessor titles The Business Magazine (1905) and The Busy Man’s Magazine (1905). Although popular culture, news headlines, and politics are the general focus, each title has a niche of emphasis. Maclean’s specializes in Canadian news and stories, Life is known for its photojournalism, People’s bent is celebrity news and human-interest stories, and Vanity Fair concentrates on fashion and current affairs. Black-and-white photographs are the norm for the early years of publications, while color photographs are standard in later issues.

USABILITY Functionality, navigability, and searchability are first-rate, leading to a highly satisfying user experience. The search page is simple but effective, with a basic search box, database selection options, a link to advanced searching, and options for searching by timeframe. Advanced search allows searching by nine fields, five date filters, and publication. The search page also has links to an EBSCO dashboard that can be customized to capture personalized search history, viewed items, and completed and in-progress projects. Search results and response times are excellent. Applying date range and publication filters narrows results to the most relevant articles, which is especially helpful with subject searches where results can run into the hundreds. For example, a general search of “Ronald Reagan” returns 908 entries but only two articles when the search is limited to the last decade. The magazine scans’ quality and readability are impressive, with content in Maclean’s and Vanity Fair being particularly colorful and sharp. Documents can be downloaded, printed, emailed, and forwarded to Google Drive and One Drive. Citations can be exported to all the most used citation management tools in MLA, APA, Chicago, and Harvard style. Libraries with subscriptions to other EBSCO databases can access content via the EBSCOhost platform. Navigation tools and user features will be familiar to EBSCO database users.

PRICING Pricing is based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to FTE, population served, existing EBSCO database subscriptions, consortium agreements, and buying groups. Pricing is subject to change based on royalty requirements and more. Contact EBSCO for a customized quote.

VERDICT The current events– and culture-focused magazines in EBSCO’s Magazine Archives are important chronicles of the happenings, people, and popular culture movements of the 20th century. Reading firsthand accounts and seeing real-time photographs of historical moments such as the bombing of Hiroshima and the March on Washington is both informative and impactful. At the same time, the archives are practical options from a ROI perspective because they fill gaps in periodical collections, integrate nicely with other EBSCOhost resources, and provide users with an intuitive and rich interface for searching its valuable content.