Exact Editions recently completed delivery of the complete archive for the New African magazine. Institutions can now subscribe to the complete archive for campus-wide access to all 430+ issues, 31,000 pages.

This short video shows some of the essential features that are necessary if magazine subscriptions are going to be sold to universities and major libraries:

  1. The archive must be a faithful reproduction of the published magazine. It has to be accurate and exactly as in print. Page by page.
  2. The software must support searches within issues and throughout the whole archive.
  3. The search software needs to be fast and reliable, and should ideally support Boolean searching, so that exact phrases and quotations can be found.
  4. Pages and articles should be bookmarkable and shareable through social media.
  5. Much of the research interest in the magazine and its archive will require citations, and that means that the pages reproduced should each have their own unique url.

This short video demonstrates these essential features, and they do so through the experience of using the archive via an app (as it happens a brilliant app for iOS devices), but the same archive is also available and fully searchable through the web using standard browsers. As it happens tablets are now the nicest and smoothest way of reading magazines in their digital format, but the web is still very important to academic and research users. So a solid and proven web delivery is essential.

Surprisingly often, magazine publishers think that their magazine and its excellent archive will be of interest to institutions, and yes it will, but only if the content is delivered in its original page format and if the content is fully searchable and kept reliably up to date. The historically accurate page by page reliability is not optional.