Although the magazine content that Google has digitized is part of Google Book rather than a separate search tool, it adds another dimension to the archival value of Google. In December 2008, just a few months after they publicized their project to digitize archives of several newspapers, Google announced that they had started adding archives of magazines to the Google Book database. Although Google has not released a list of the magazines included, there's a magazine list in Google Docs that you can help build as the collection grows by completing the form at the bottom of this page.

Although the title list is short at this early stage of the project, here are a few samples of the articles you can access through this magazine time machine:

• The January 9, 1984 cover story of New York Magazine: Living with the Computer - about America's emerging computer culture
• The June 1975 cover story of Popular Science about electric cars: Two Little Electrics You Can Buy Right Now
• The September 1969 issue of The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: Men on the Moon - An Assessment
  

Searching Magazines

If you wish to limit your Google Book search to magazine content, go to Advanced Book Search and click the Magazines radio button. If you prefer, you may leave the default setting in place which would be to include magazine results mixed with book results.


This archival content provides valuable opportunities to access primary source material. For instance, let's imagine that you want to search for articles in Jet magazine about the Supreme Court's decision for Loving v. Virginia in 1967. Your search might look like this:


When your results appear, you can open the article you selected by clicking the link at the top of the result.


The article will open to the first section where your search words appear - and they'll be highlighted. You can move through the article using the arrows beside the page number or the scroll bar alongside the article, and you can search the full-text of that issue by using the search box in the upper right.

Browsing Magazines

In addition to searching, you can browse magazine issues or search all the issues of one particular magazine. This can be fun if you're looking for eye-catching cover art, wish to see how design changed over time, or want to get a sense of a particular year or decade. It also lets you see the dates of the issues included in Google Book. Once you have a result from a magazine, there will be an About this magazine link at the bottom of the result.


Clicking this will open the About this magazine section showing the publisher and ISSN, and providing a search box for searching all archived content for that magazine, as well as a cover-by-cover visual navigation bar for finding issues from various time periods. The years (in the example below, 1950, 1960, 1965, etc.) are guide tabs for quick access to a range of dates starting with that year (although this feature sometimes misbehaves and you'll end up finding 1987 by clicking on 2000). If it's working properly, you'd find 1967 by clicking on 1965 and then scrolling to the right.

Tips

Working with the magazine content of Google Book can be challenging. Here are a few tips:

• If you do a regular Google Book search and then decide you'd like to limit to magazines, one way to eliminate many (though not all) of the book results is to change your results to show "full view only" since all archived magazines are full-view. You can also go back to the search page, click the Magazines radio button, and execute the search again.
  
• Advanced Search uses the title field for the title of the magazine and some individual article titles, but it is not a reliable way to search article titles.
  
• Once you open a magazine, you can sometimes click on article titles in the Table of Contents to go directly to those pages.

Additional Lists of Google Magazines

• Univ. of Iowa Libraries (Eric Rumsey)
• List by Subject Category (Jeanne Kramer-Smith)
• Alphabetic List (Thomas Gruber - comments in German)

Have you discovered a magazine in Google Book that's not included on the current magazine list?