Education Magazine Archive

CONTENT ProQuest’s Education Magazine Archive provides teachers, school administrators, and education researchers with primary-source material on educational methodology, research, and practice. Content spans 1910–2015 and comprises 850,000 pages of backfiles from four scholarly journals, nine magazines, and 13 trade journals. The publications cover general topics (American Teacher), specific subject areas (Mathematics Teacher), higher education (Higher Education Management and Policy), vocational education (Techniques), school librarianship (School Library Journal), women and people of color in education (Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin; Black Collegian), and essential topics related to the field of education, such as leadership (English Leadership Quarterly). Coverage for each title starts with volume one, issue one; content is digitized in color when available.

USABILITY The understated homepage features a prominent search box at the center, with basic search set as the default. Above this box are facets for advanced searching and browsing by publication and an option for switching between other ProQuest databases (content will depend on an organization’s other subscriptions). A “search tips” link just below the box provides extensive user assistance, with information on operators, fields, special characters, and more. A drop-down menu at the upper-left corner of the screen features many of the same categories with an additional “Help” tab. “Advanced Search” allows users to search by author, title, document type, document feature, publication date, place of publication, and ISSN. Spelling and form variants for search terms are allowed, making for a more responsive and accessible search experience. All searches in a session are saved for the duration of the session.

The “Publications” option is the most direct path for locating specific titles. The link takes users to a “Publication Search” page—a complete list of all titles within the archive, including details on full-text coverage dates, ISSN, publisher, and place of publication, with an A–Z title selection option. A “View Title Only” option allows users to see a simplified alphabetical listing of titles, with links to each title’s dedicated content page. In addition, the “Publication Search” page offers choices for searching by source type, publication subject, place of publication, and publisher.

Response time is immediate, with in-depth results. A search for articles on banned books retrieved 240 titles published between 1952 and 2015, including four peer-reviewed articles. Retrieved articles can be sorted by relevance, limited to peer-reviewed titles, or narrowed by document type, publication title, or publisher. Articles can be translated into 20 languages other than English. Eighteen cloud-saving, citation-export, and Microsoft tools are available. Browsing entire issues is intuitive, and the quality of the scans is faultless.

PRICING Academic library pricing is based on full-time enrollment. Public library pricing is based on population served. Pricing discounts are available when libraries agree to a multiyear subscription.

VERDICT Teachers, educational administrators, and policymakers can benefit greatly from the content in the Education Magazine Archive. This is also a first-rate resource for anyone wanting to know more about the history, development, and evolution of educational policy, practice, and theory over the last century. As with other ProQuest resources, functionality, discoverability, and searchability are superb.