• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, January 14, 2016

While it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but as a history buff, it's the kind of thing I get a little too excited about: digital archives of women’s magazines!

Yes, the excitement is palpable as ProQuest unveils its Women’s Magazine Archive, giving researchers online access to digital versions of major women’s magazines spanning the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, including Good Housekeeping, 1885-2004; Better Homes and Gardens, 1922-2005; Ladies’ Home Journal, 1883-2005; Redbook, 1903-2005; Parents, 1926-2005; and Chatelaine, 1928-2005.

Women’s magazines are an incredibly important resource for historians because, as one of the first mass print media along with newspapers, they provide a window into cultural and social changes over time,.

They touch on everything from gender roles and race relations to technology and healthcare. Feminist historians have also investigated their role in creating expectations for women’s appearance and behavior over the decades. No surprise, the ads are at least as valuable as the editorial content in this regard.

The archive currently contains 250,000 pages of content, which will increase to around 850,000 pages when scanning is complete.

This is just the latest in a series of major digital archiving initiatives.

Last August, Gannett joined forces with Ancestry, a service that allows users to trace their genealogy back in some cases for centuries, to digitize the archives for over 80 daily newspapers owned by Gannett across the U.S. The digital archives, consisting of over 100 million pages, is available for viewing on Newspapers.com, another Web site owned by Ancestry.

Also last year, men’s lifestyle mag Esquire unveiled a massive digital archive, called Esquire Classic, which contains every issue, cover, story, image, cartoon and advertisement it has published from 1933 to today.

Archives can become part of ad campaigns too. Back in 2013, The New York Times created a custom advertising unit incorporating historic content drawn from its archives, available digitally via its TimesMachine platform, to help promote National Geographic’s “Killing Lincoln.”