Magazine archive collections: Home

Hiebert Library provides full-text, cover-to-cover content from four of the most influential American magazines: 

• Atlantic Magazine Archive (1857-1910, with content through 2000 available by mid-December 2018)  
• Bloomberg Businessweek Archive (1929-2000)
• Life Magazine Archive (1936-2000)
• Time Magazine Archive (1923-2000)

These archive collections include not only the individual articles (like in other library databases) but also covers, illustrations, and searchable advertisements.

While it's possible to find content from these archive collections through general searches, you'll get the best results if you go directly to the collection's search page. This tutorial will show you how to do that. 

In the library discovery service, search for any of the collections using the titles above. Click the title that appears underneath Database Recommendation at the top of the page. That will take you to a page that looks something like this:

Enter your search term into the search box near the top of the page, and specify the type of field if you wish to do so. You can fine tune your search using the Search Modes and Expanders or Limit Your Results options. Feel free to experiment with any of these options, but here are some that we find particularly useful:

• In Search modes and expanders, you might want to consider clicking the also search within the full text of the articles​ option if you want to make sure you find absolutely everything on your topic. Be aware, though, that this might result in lots of results that you don't really want.
• In Limit your results, the Publication date and Document type options can be very helpful.  

Once you've done a search, you'll get a results page looking something like this one for subject=world wide web:

You can order your results by relevance, date, or author by clicking on the drop down menu near the upper right corner of the results screen (it says "date oldest" on our example image). Click on any title from the results list or on the associated PDF Full Text icon.

Once you're looking at the image of the article, you can also navigate to other articles or advertisements in the same issue by using the navigation bar to the left of the article image, which looks something like the image to the right:

You'll have to click on the "chapter" links (the ones showing ranges of numbers like "46-50" and then click on specific articles or advertisements within each chapter. It's isn't the easiest navigation system ever devised, but it works.

You may download PDF articles to your own device. The process of doing that will differ, depending on what browser you're using to access the site.

These instructions assume that you're searching for particular content within the magazine archive. But it's also possible that you might want to look for a particular issue or range of issues regardless of content. EBSCO has hidden that feature pretty well, but there's a way to do it. Follow these steps:

• Start with a blank EBSCOhost search screen as described earlier in this tutorial. 
• On the blue bar across the top of the screen, click Publications.
• You will see a results like containing only one item, which is the magazine you are already searching.
• Click on the title of the magazine, which will display a list of issues in reverse order on the right side of the screen. 
• Select the issue you want to view, which will display a list of articles in that issue.
• Once you've selected an article, the viewing and navigation are the same as described above.

Some of the articles in these collections (especially ones in Life), feature photographs and text printed across two-page spreads. These won't display very nicely in the EBSCOhost interface. If you want to see them as they were intended to look, you have two options:

• Download the article and open it in Adobe Reader, with the View/Page Display/Two-page scrolling option selected. This only works correctly if the article begins on a left-hand page in the original issue.
• If the original article began on the right-hand page, you'll need to print the article and view it on paper. If you have the Adobe Acrobat program rather than simply the Reader, you can insert a blank page at the beginning of the file, which will force it to display correctly on your screen with the View/Page Display/Two-page scrolling option selected.