[Genealib] Genealogical periodical usage

[M. Diane Rogers]

Related questions/comments - since you asked...

I'm the Editor of a genealogical society journal "The British Columbia 
[Canada] Genealogist" and am indexing the issues for our last 5 years 
(subject/author/genealogical surnames).  We have a 'Table of Contents' index 
already on our website.  (Then we will work back through the other years.)

Which kind of indexes would be most useful to librarians/patrons? And in 
what formats? We might put these indexes on our website and publish as a 
.pdf for our members. I was thinking a paper version would be more 
appreciated by librarians?

I don't know that the 'major databases' are that interested in society 
journals, but the Canadian Periodical Index (Gale) includes "Families", the 
OGS journal. My experience is that few genealogists here use these 
databases, unless they are researching in academic libraries. (I am not a 
librarian though, I hasten to add.) OGS also sells an index on paper and CD.

And I know our journal is one of our society's main membership benefits and 
we need members and membership fees to survive. We do sell back issues and 
we do lookups or copy articles for a small fee. I was thinking soon we might 
offer articles using a service like lulu.com. I don't think we'd want to 
hand that over to a big commercial company, at least not yet.

Many of our members do read other genealogical/historical journals 
regularly.  Our library volunteers comb through journals every quarter for 
interesting articles and we publish lists of their favourites in our 
journal.

Any ideas will be appreciated.

M. Diane Rogers
British Columbia, Canada
British Columbia Genealogical Society: www.bcgs.ca