“As psychiatrists know better than perhaps any other medical specialty, studying the past is the best way to understand the present and to change the future.”—Nancy C. Andresen, M.D., Ph.D., Editor Emeritus, American Journal of Psychiatry

The Psychiatry Legacy Collection is the journal backfiles project of American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. (APPI). This collection covers more than a century of psychiatry through six respected, peer-reviewed psychiatry journals (see list below), completing APPI's online journals back to Volume 1, Issue 1. The collection dates back to 1844 and includes The American Journal of Psychiatry, the oldest continuously published medical specialty journal in the United States. Access to the Psychiatry Legacy Collection partnered with a subscription to the current volume allows today's research and clinical practice to be placed in the context of the history of psychiatry.

Fully searchable, high-resolution scans were created from the original printed pages to ensure easy online reading and printing. Johns Hopkins University’s Welch Medical Library donated many issues from their own collection for the project. According to Chung Kim, Welch’s Associate Director of Digital Library Services, “We believe that the digitizing of backfiles of major journals will advance the interests of scientific research. The Welch Library is happy to be a part of this effort to disseminate scientific information to a wider audience as well as to help build a comprehensive electronic archive.”

The Psychiatry Legacy Collection includes

• The American Journal of Psychiatry: Volumes 1–153, 1844–1996
  
  
  • Volume 1 (1844) thru 77 (1921) published as The American Journal of Insanity
  
  
• Academic Psychiatry: Volumes 13–21, 1989–1996
  
  
  • Not included: Volumes 1–12 (1988) published as Journal of Psychiatric Education and owned by another publisher
  
  
• Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences: Volumes 1–9, 1989–1996
  
• Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research: Volumes 1–6, 1992–1996
  
• Psychiatric Services: Volumes 1–48, 1950–1996
  
• Psychosomatics: Volumes 1–38, 1960–1996

Frequently Asked Questions]
What is the format of the Psychiatry Legacy Collection articles? Are they accessed through the same interface as current articles? Is the collection searchable? How does the legacy content differ from the current articles?

The entire run of the APPI journals—including the Psychiatry Legacy Collection content—is hosted on the popular HighWire Press platform. The Psychiatry Legacy Collection shares the same access and search interface as the current issues of the journals. For example, if you visit the Browse Contents by Issue (http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/contents-by-date.0.shtml) page for American Journal of Psychiatry, you can access both current articles and legacy articles (1997 back to 1844) from that single location.

Institutions who purchase the Psychiatry Legacy Collection and a current subscription will have seamless access to the whole run of the journal. The only difference between current and legacy (pre-1997) content is that legacy articles are available only as PDF. Current articles are usually available as both HTML and PDF, but we don’t have HTML views of most legacy articles; the PDF files were created by scanning those very old print pages and then “OCRing” the resulting image so that it is recognizable as text and thus searchable.

The Advanced Search form allows users to search across current and Psychiatry Legacy Collection content with a single search—that is, the entire run of a single journal or multiple journals available from APPI can be searched at once. The powerful search interface also offers search refinement by journal, year(s), volume, page number, author, and words in the title, abstract, and/or text.

Is the Psychiatry Legacy Collection complete?

You might notice that we are not quite finished with the work on the Psychiatry Legacy Collection. So many people have been clamoring for access to these back issues that we released them before the work is totally done. We’re still working on the full-text indexing that will lead to the legacy articles showing up consistently in search results (this step should be done by May 2006). We're also engaged in a gap-filling project to double-check that all articles are online and are linked to correctly. (If you run across missing articles or bad links please click the “Feedback” link available from most pages of the site.)

We are also still in the process of working with PubMed to enable linkout pointers to full-text availability.

Are the Psychiatry Legacy Collection articles compatible with screen reader programs like JAWS that are often used by readers with vision impairments?

The Psychiatry Legacy Collection PDFs were created by scanning the old print pages and then “OCRing” the resulting image so that it is recognizable as text. The resulting composite PDFs worked reasonably well with the JAWS screen reader during our tests. However, because the legacy PDFs were not created from digital typesetting files, their accessibility is not as high as HTML or tagged PDFs optimized for accessibility. We’d be glad to offer a free trial of the Psychiatry Legacy Collection PDFs to see if they meet the needs of your users.

What assurances do you offer that institutional purchasers of the Psychiatry Legacy Collection will have perpetual access to the archived material once they have paid their one-time fee?

We make the Psychiatry Legacy Collection (and all of our online journal and book content) available for archiving via LOCKSS (http://lockss.stanford.edu/index.html). The LOCKSS program allows institutional participants to store a backup copy of our content on a library-installed LOCKSS server. We chose LOCKSS as a persistent access preservation system in the event that APPI is unable to continue providing online access because of their commitment to preservation of digital information.