One very practical problem of researching in historic periodicals is the poor physical condition of many of the documents. The high-acid content of the paper on which the periodicals were printed makes them fragile to handle, and difficult or prohibitively expensive for libraries to maintain. Microfiche, while solving the deterioration problems, is not amenable to casual browsing or searching. Information technology offers solutions to most of these problems. A number of publishers are making available current publications online.
Publishers make available to varying degrees back issues, and search capabilities.
Most of these efforts do not go back in time more than a few years. This is also a subscription service. This project has, to date, scanned nearly one million pages from nineteenth century books and periodicals. Pages are first posted on the web as graphic images, but the project's goals include converting the images to text, so that full text searches will be possible. This project holds the promise of allowing scholars of the nineteenth century to gain a window into a very broad spectrum of writing, an ability previously reserved for more specialized writings, like the plays of Shakespere, the Bible, or Greek tragedies.