New e-resource: RIPM North American and European Music Periodicals (Preservation Series)

The RIPM North American and European Music Periodicals Preservation series collection is available to access until 30 April 2021.

Access to content in RIPM Preservation Series is based upon optical character recognition (OCR) technology. This technology transforms pictures of letters into text and consequently provides access to all words, but it does not provide information concerning the context in which the search term(s) appears.

However, the Preservation Series is quite different from the other systems of access based on OCR, because it was planned with journals rather than monographs in mind. Thus, while the Google Books and HathiTrust offer access to journals on a volume to volume basis, reflecting the holdings of contributing libraries only with little or no effort to supply complete runs, the Preservation Series simultaneously provides access to all the issues of a journal (an extensive effort in itself) and equally to all journals. Like Google Books and HathiTrust, the RIPM Preservation Series does not offer titling information or the identification of specific types of content (reviews, illustrations, poem, analysis etc.). But unlike the others, the Preservation Series:

• allows searching of complete journal runs and cross-journal searches;
• offers a simple downloading process for saving and printing;
• automatically downloading of full-text pages with supplies fundamental bibliographical information (journal tile, date of publication, volume, issue, page number);
• permits the user to make personal observations in a Notes field;
• offers three types of sorts (chronological, density—the number of times a search term appears in an issue/ page— and journal title);
• bibliogaphical information is supplied on each journal page viewed;
• each journal page viewed directly from index supplies the number of “hits” and the hit currently being viewed.

Finally, when downloading a single page, the page number is automatically included. When downloading multiple pages, the user must select the page numbers, and, if desired, add further bibliographic information, such as article title and author’s name.

Text taken from the RIPM information page.