Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Findmypast Making Progress Digitizing PERSI Articles

PERSI is available on Findmypast.comI came across a list of periodicals that Findmypast has added to its PERSI collection.

According to the FamilySearch Wiki,

The Periodical Source Index, or PERSI, is the largest subject index to genealogy and local history periodical articles in the world. Created by the staff of the Allen County Public Library Foundation and the ACPL’s Genealogy Center, PERSI is widely recognized as a vital tool for genealogical researchers. PERSI indexes articles in 11,000 periodical titles (including 3,000 defunct titles) published by thousands of local, state, national and international societies and organizations, arranging 2.25 million entries by surname or location and 22 basic subject headings.

While indexing all these articles, PERSI doesn’t actually include them. Researchers must subsequently find a copy of the periodical. Fortunately, PERSI includes a list of institutions holding the respective titles. Or one can pay a small copying fee and get copies of articles from the Allen County Public Library.

You’ll recall that Findmypast added the PERSI index to their website back in February 2014. As part of that partnership, Findmypast is digitizing indexed articles, which increases the value of PERSI by several orders of magnitude. While I hope Findmypast can negotiate posting of recent periodicals, the list indicates that thus far they have not done so. All currently posted articles are from magazine issues for which the copyright has expired. Still, the list is pretty impressive:

You may wish to check it out. Even without a subscription, searching PERSI on the Findmypast website provides useful pointers toward indexed articles.

1 comment:

  1. The Aberdeen Journal is from SCOTLAND, not England. How can we trust anything you publish if you make such elementary errors ???

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