ILEJ, the "Internet Library of Early Journals" is a joint project by the Universities of Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Oxford, conducted under the auspices of the eLib (Electronic Libraries) Programme. It aims to digitize substantial runs of 18th and 19th century British journals and make these images available on the Internet, together with their associated bibliographic data.

The journals available today include: Gentleman's Magazine, The Annual Register, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Notes and Queries, The Builder, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Each of those publications includes at least twenty consecutive years now available online. You can currently search on Blackwood's, Gentleman's, Notes and Queries, and Philosophical Transaction. Each title is separately searchable.

Searching is very easy: a couple of query boxes and a Boolean connector. Searching Gentleman's for "shipping" found seven results. Results include the date and volume of the issue and the phrase containing your keyword. When you click on the date of the issue, you'll be given a picture of the relevant page. Icons on the top left of the page allow you to flip back and forth or zoom in on a page. The pages seem to be very readable on-screen and can also be printed from your webbrowser.

The documents were obviously scanned by OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This technology can result in very good conversion of text into computer bits and bytes, but it is rarely perfect. For example, a search on the word "Eastman" produced a link to a page that did not have the word on it. However, that page did mention the town of Eastham. One has to assume that was an error in the OCR process. In any case, the user always sees an image of the original page, not the OCR results. As such, the data displayed will always be correct, even if the index that provided the path to that page is in error. Such scanning errors are common when converting old books to modern computer formats.

The Internet Library of Early Journals is available online now and is free to everyone. You can check it out yourself at: www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ilej/

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