American Periodicals from the Center for Research Libraries (APCRL) is a digital collection of 375 popular and trade journals from Center for Research Library collections digitized in collaboration with ProQuest. CRL undertook the American Periodicals digitization project to provide electronic access to materials that have seen increasing use in recent years, and to protect the fragile originals from harm or loss through handling and use. The University of Pennsylvania filled some significant gaps in CRL holdings and titles.

All of the APCRL content was scanned, cover-to-cover, directly from original volumes. All page scans are in color to capture instances of commercial color printing applications. Article text and illustration captions are OCR’d to facilitate searching.

ProQuest and CRL staff selected titles from the mid-19^th to the early 20^th centuries from many fields.  They excluded journals already available in other digital collections, and made titles frequently requested by researchers at CRL libraries a priority. Most of the titles chosen ceased publication prior to the 1923 cutoff for public domain copyright status, but ProQuest negotiated rights with publishers to include some title runs up through the 1970s.

The popular magazines included in APCRL provide insights into significant social and cultural changes at the turn of the last century. Articles on amateur portrait and nature photography, the ideal features of domestic architecture, or outdoor winter recreation suggest a growth in leisure activities. Specialized titles for a number of political and lifestyle movements include Vegetarian Magazine, Woman’s Protest against Woman Suffrage, The Theosophical Path, and Physical Culture. Various professional and trade journals combine to provide a nuanced view of industrial development, new technologies, and innovations in transportation and communications. Researchers can explore topics including: the challenge of rubber shortages, especially during wartime; the impact of automobiles on urban planning; or changes in merchandising of hardware goods.

The APCRL collection significantly augments the range of literary and political journals in ProQuest’s American Periodicals Series (APS), and is available on the same platform.