20,000 Magazines at Your Fingertips

While an increasing number of magazines and newspapers have been succumbing to the economic downturn – either disappearing entirely or moving to online publication only—Google and some publishers are beginning to make the full content of magazine archives available online for free. A few of the magazines with substantial digital content and archives are Baseball Digest (1945-2007), Jet (1961-2008), New York Magazine (1968-1997), Popular Mechanics (1905-2005) and Popular Science (1872-2008). The Life Photo Archive offers millions of photos as well.

These are all wonderful resources, but in reality the number of magazines available for free online is still very small. Google, for example, offers about 150 different magazines, a tiny fraction of the more than 300,000 magazines currently in print or no longer being published. Most magazines still restrict access to their online content, either providing it only to subscribers, limiting access to only certain material or not making digital content available at all. How many times have you gone to a magazine’s website looking for a particular article, only to be met by a message telling you that “To read this article in full, please login or purchase a subscription?”

Fortunately, there is an online source for the content of more than 20,000 magazines, newspapers, scholarly journals and newsletters:  The Seattle Public Library! You can access more than two dozen different databases on the Library’s Magazines & Newspapers page that provide tens of millions of articles. One of the largest databases, General OneFile, contains over 90 million articles! PressDisplay provides beautiful cover-to-cover access for more than 1400 current newspapers from over 80 countries in 40 different languages (with translation available). The New York Times Historical Database includes full-page images of this newspaper from 1851 through 2006. These are just three of the magazine and newspaper databases available to you.

Most of these databases provide full-text articles, often in the form of actual PDF pages images, and the articles can be viewed, emailed, downloaded, printed, listened to or shared via social bookmarking. Most importantly, these databases go well beyond the internet versions of most magazines. Because the Library subscribes to these databases, the magazines make their full article content available to you through the Library website, whereas they otherwise restrict access to their digital content.

You have more articles, and more magazines, at your fingertips—all available for free with your Seattle Public Library card. Don’t hesitate to contact Library staff with any questions you may have about these resources. The Central Library also offers a hands-on class each month that will teach you how to search for magazine and newspaper articles.

When you can’t find it in print or on the internet, go green with paperless magazines and smudge-free newspapers… from the Library’s Magazine & Newspaper Databases!

~Dona and Michael, Central Library