Internet resources: Over 100 years of “Scientific American” magazine now available online

The Scientific American archive brings together over 100 years of content highlighting advancements in science, technology, and medicine. Institutional customers can now access every issue of Scientific American back to January 1910. Scientific American, part of Nature Publishing Group (NPG), entrusted the scanning and digitization of most of the paper archives to MPS Limited ‘s archive conversion unit, following MPS’s successful digitization of NPG’s flagship journal, Nature.

The MPS team designed a set of specialized in-house tools to convert each issue to XML before publishing it online. The text of the content is fully searchable and is presented in PDF form to preserve the look and feel of the original issues. Work to expand Scientific American’s archive back to 1845, its first year of publication, is currently under way.

Scientific American’s online archive reveals a wealth of treasure from the magazine’s history. Gems include: a 1932 article called “And Now the Neutron;” the 1954 article prophetically entitled “Computers in Business”; and policy pieces including the 1990 Al Gore essay, “A New Initiative to Save the Planet.”