Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Montana: The Magazine of Western History Online

Montana: The Magazine of Western History Articles: Readers of this blog will likely be familiar with this wonderful publication. Published by the Montana Historical Society, Montana does a nice job of bridging the divide between scholarly and popular writing, with well-researched articles written in an accessible style and presented in a lavishly illustrated magazine format. It turns out all of the articles from 1999 to the present are available online at FindArticles.com.

The presentation of the articles leaves much to be desired. They are hosted on a commercial site which is plastered with advertising. The crude search function is useless. Though each article includes a citation to the year and month of publication, but important bibliographic information such as the volume and number, and original pagination, are not included. And there are no illustrations.

Interestingly, however, the MHS itself has a site for the magazine that makes up for some of the faults of the FindArticles site. The MHS site for Montana has a few of the articles online with the original illustrations--though there is no way to find these without clicking through each of the back issues. There is however a searchable index that could be used to identify articles that could then be found at the FindArticles site.

As my mom would say, What do you want for nothing? Nine years of the best popular western history magazine are now available online. Enjoy.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great news! I'll see if we can't get a link added to the Washington State Library's online catalog too. Happy reading!

Larry Cebula said...

It is great news, but the lack of illustrations is disappointing. Montana without the illustrations is like a fine French meal without the wine.