Cambridge University Press and the Society of Antiquaries of London (SAL) have announced the completion of the online archives of Archaeologia, Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of London and the Antiquaries Journal. Collectively they comprise the journal archives of SAL and span 242 years, encompassing key research in the study of material culture and antiquity. The publication history of Archaeologia dates back from 1770 and represents the oldest journal archive hosted on Cambridge Journals Online. Cambridge Journals is the online journals publishing service of Cambridge University Press.
The SAL journals are seen to reflect the multi-disciplinary nature of the study of material culture, publishing a balanced mix of papers from all periods, from prehistory to the recent past. They address research questions from a variety of perspectives, combining, for example, historical, art historical, architectural, linguistic, archaeological and scientific data.
As part of the on-going project to digitise the back content of all Cambridge journals, the SAL journals were subject to scanning and extensive checking by a dedicated archive team to ensure all pages met the high standards required. The Archaeologia archive alone contains 46,500 pages across 222 volumes, and each of these pages required detailed checking.
The age of the articles themselves presented problems and necessitated a careful hand during the scanning process as well as a careful eye to decipher the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century letter-forms. In addition, key metadata and references within each article needed to be coded in XML (and then to HTML) to ensure they could be easily discoverable and accessible.
The SAL journal archives are available to purchase by institutions as part of an archive collection.
