When I first heard about Google's plan to scan the contents of the major libraries of the world, it seemed like a great idea, but it wasn't books I was considering. Books are certainly important, and it would be great to perform searches across collections of books. But books are already well catalogued by libraries, and it's fairly straightforward to hunt down books that touch on particular topics. Instead, I was anticipating a revolution in researching periodicals. It is in centuries worth of periodicals — everything from scholarly journals with circulations in the hundreds to popular magazines and newspapers — that I think most of the world's collective knowledge is encapsulated. This is where digitization would compensate for the historic deficiencies in periodical cataloguing. Cataloguing these periodicals would mean treating each issue as an entity in itself, but also treating it as a collection of articles with distinct titles and authors. For example, if two articles
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