Retrospective Indexes Online

Temple University Libraries has recently begun access to the retrospective files of indexes that were once mainstays of many American academic libraries:

Readers' Guide Retrospective (1890-1982)

Humanities & Social Sciences Index Retrospective (1907-1984)

The Readers' Guide is important because it indexes citations to general audience magazines before the 1980's--which is about when most electronic databases begin their earliest coverage. There are 50 periodicals indexed from 1890 to 1899 and an increasing numbers after that.

Humanities & Social Sciences Indexes are indexes of more scholarly periodicals than those covered in the Readers' Guide--a selective number of titles chosen by boards of editors and librarians over the years that fit the criteria of being both important to their respective fields and likely to be held in most academic libraries. These indexes continue today as Humanities Abstracts and Social Sciences Abstracts, to which Temple University Libraries maintains access. In their present form, they are both useful for guiding students to limited sets of well-regarded scholarly periodicals.

--Rick Lezenby