The Victorian Periodicals Newsletter (VPN), January, April and July 1970

When I look back at the three issues of 1970 that I edited, I am amazed at the energy, ambition, and enthusiasm of the contributors to those numbers. The enthusiasm was generated primarily by the formation of the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals at the Victorian Periodicals Conference in October, 1969. Also, specific research projects had been proposed, particularly in the first three numbers of VPN, and reports of their progress formed one major type of contribution to the newsletter. One of these, Michael Wolff's "Victorian Periodicals Project" (VPP) led to a pilot computer programming study at the Indiana Research Computing Center, funded by the Chapelbrook Foundation of Boston and the Council on Library Resources. Other projects included H. W. McCready's checklist of manuscript resources for Victorian periodicals, Henry and Sheila Rosenberg's "Bibliography of Writings on Nineteenth-Century Periodicals," and James E. O'Neill's list of "Victorian Periodicals and Newspapers in Microform." All of these ambitious projects were featured in the January 1970 number.

Certainly some of the enthusiasm of these early numbers may be accounted for by writers' sense that VPN provided a forum for sharing information and raising questions, in a notes and queries format or in information about dissertations in progress. Researchers could share the pitfalls (and ways to avoid them) they had discovered in periodicals research as Wayne Somers does in "Aids to the Use of Poole's Index."

VPN began with collaborative research. While I was editing VPN in early 1970, I was trying to finish my doctoral dissertation at Indiana University and interviewing for jobs, and, eventually, getting ready to move to Purdue University for the fall of the 1970 academic year. It was a busy time. Drawing on researchers in academic disciplines where collaborative research is rare, the periodicals research reported in VPN provided an alternative model of research that I have continued to use in the courses I teach. I was heartened especially by the calls for collaborative research such as William H. Scheuerle's work on VPN Project # 3, which was an attempt to identify and list persons connected with Victorian periodicals as reported in the Dictionary of National Biography, and J. Don Vann's work on an annual bibliography, both in the April 1970 number. If there was a frustration in editing these early numbers, it was the lack of response to requests for suggestions and criticisms for the projects. However, I am heartened that today the annual RSVP conference continues to focus on collaborative learning and research about and with periodicals.

The most ambitious publication of the three numbers was Helene E. Roberts's "British Art Periodicals of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries" which took up the whole of the July 1970 number. Although that piece was the result of her individual research, she offered it in the collaborative sense of VPN's style by asking for "suggestions of additional titles or supplemental information" she might include in her planned history of British art periodicals.

Throughout my work on the newsletter Michael Wolff was always encouraging from far off Massachusetts, and the editors and editorial assistants working on Victorian Studies, with whom I shared an office, offered generous practical help.

The computer programming for the "Victorian Periodicals Project" that I worked on intensively would look much different today with 2007 computer capabilities. However, that early effort led to a proposal in 1971 by the University of Waterloo to develop computer programs and machine entry techniques for an alphabetical listing of all the titles in the chronological listing of the Times Tercentenary Handlist of English and Welsh Newspapers, Magazines and Reviews (TTH). The eventual result was The Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900, Phase I, edited by Michael Wolff, John S. North, and Dorothy Deering, which was sponsored by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals and Waterloo Computing in the Humanities, and published for the University of Waterloo by Wilfred Laurier University Press. Now we are in a digital age when we can work not only on listing titles but also on making the periodicals themselves available for reading...