Indiana Magazine of History

General description: Published continuously since 1905, the is one of the nation's oldest historical journals. Since 1913, the IMH has been edited and published quarterly at Indiana University, Bloomington. Today, the IMH features peer-reviewed articles, research notes, annotated primary documents, reviews, and critical essays that contribute to public and scholarly understanding of midwestern and Indiana history.

Implementation description: Encoding the IMH came with its own sets of challenges due to the variety of content types included within the journal, and the changes in structure over its 102-year print history. In addition to scholarly articles, tables of contents, indexes, and other text types commonly found in journals, the text of the IMH contains reprints of primary source materials from letters and diaries to election results. The presence of tabular data and highly structured text such as poetry posed structural difficulties, while foreign languages and a proliferation of proper names created the need for focused semantic encoding.

For the purpose of this project, the semantic encoding focused on article types (scholarly, book reviews, and editorial materials), article features (diaries, letters, and bibliographies) and place names. Structural encoding focused on basic print conventions for serials such as page breaks, bylines, etc. as well as lists, tables, blockquotes and footnotes.

The encoding required to faithfully represent the text would have been prohibitively expensive, and was furthermore unnecessary due to the facsimile page images provided. Certain structural elements such as columns and verse, and semantic elements such as personal names and back matter indices were not encoded for these reasons.

Issue-level encoding following the Guidelines for Electronic Text Encoding and Interchange, version P4 was employed to maintain the conceptual integrity of the print journal. Like most journals, articles in the IMH have two sets of bibliographic metadata: issue-level and article-level. The journal also contains book review articles, consisting of multiple reviews, each with its own set of metadata. In order to provide readers with issue-level browse access and article-level search access (e.g., search by article title or author), bibliographic metadata was captured for the issue and for each of the articles, including discrete book reviews, within the issue by way of independent headers.

Copyright information: Some volumes of the Indiana Magazine of History are protected by copyright law, and are presented here in electronic form for non-commercial, personal, and research uses, and other uses as permitted under Section 107 (Fair Use) and other statutory exemptions to the copyright law. All other use, including but not limited to commercial or scholarly reproductions, redistribution, publication or transmission, whether by electronic means or otherwise, is strictly prohibited without the prior permission of the copyright holder. Generally, items published before 1923 are in the public domain, but a determination of the status of an item ultimately rests with the person desiring to reproduce or use the item.

Contact:

Michelle Dalmau

Indiana University Digital Library Program

Herman B Wells Library, W501

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, IN 47401

Telephone: (812) 855-1261

Email: mdalmau@indiana.edu