Resources - OUP archive boosts Humanities. First of a range of new backfile projects from Oxford Journals will give researchers and academics full access to its Humanities Archive. Mark Chillingworth sized it up.

The Humanities Archive from Oxford Journals, the journal publishing division of Oxford University Press (OUP), is the first of a major digitisation and backfile project OUP has undertaken.

Launched in July, the Humanities Archive will be followed by archive databases covering Law, Medicine, Science and Social Sciences, which are expected to be launched in January 2006.

Richard Gedye, sales and marketing director for Oxford Journals said the archive strategy was to address a growing demand for archive content to be available online.

Users of the Humanities archive can research history, music, religion, philosophy, literary studies and linguistics from journals such as English Historical Review, History Journal Workshop, Journal of the History of Medicine and Twentieth Century British History. Oxford Journals claims the archive houses 300,000 articles published between 1829 and 1995.

The challenge for an archive of this size is attaching archive content to the latest content. Oxford Journals' approach to this is to give each title in the archive its own homepage. Thus users are taken to a site for a journal such as Greece and Rome. From here they can search the archive or the latest edition, as well as sign up for free email alerts of new content.

Archives need to provide users with a wide range of tools - not only for searching out content, but also using it once discovered. The Humanities Archive features options to view article abstracts or PDFs, as you would expect, but there are also links to similar articles within the journal an article was drawn from. This provides that physical browsing element to electronic journals that exist when you use the printed edition.

Users outside of an institutional subscription also have the option of one-off purchases, which is increasingly important to publishers and users in the age of Google Scholar.