Virginia Quarterly Review opens Archives!

February 10, 2009 5:58 PM

The Virginia Quarterly Review — "A National Journal of Literature and Discussion" — just made public every article, essay, book review etc. published in its pages between 1975 and 2003. Search the archives here or check out this blog post for some greatest hits.
posted by Bizurke (9 comments total)

Wow.
posted by stbalbach at 6:11 PM on February 10

I am glad this is avaliable and thank you for posting it, but grrrr. I was reading a poem, Cuba, Where Art Thou? and saw the dreaded: "The remaining 51 words in this article are available only to paid subscribers..." Obviously I need to poke around pre '03.
posted by dawson at 6:22 PM on February 10

Curse you, internet! When I am supposed to sleep?
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:35 PM on February 10

I love it when I open Metafilter and see a link to VQR. :) (I'm the web guy for VQR.) FYI, you can browse our back issues, which is probably going to be a more satisfying process than running a bunch of searches. The Autumn 2003 issue is the first one that's open to all, clear back to the Spring 1975 issue. And, just for good measure, our 2006 Fall Fiction issue is available in its entirety, too, including the three most-popular articles from it, Joyce Carol Oates' vision of an Emily Dickinson robot, Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick, and Steve Almond's preemptive writing of James Frey's obituary.

Dawson, I'm totally with you on that "The remaining X words are available only to paid subscribers" thing. Just a few weeks ago I was reading an article on some site and, after a solid 10 minutes of reading, I got that "you've got to pay to read the rest of this message." WTF? I wouldn't have put that time in if I'd known I'd be cut off. The next day it occurred me: Damn, we do that on VQR. My thinking is that we should put a brief message at the top, with the full "sorry, but you've got to pay" message at the bottom, but I'd definitely love to hear about any other approaches. I've never seen this done properly, so there's not really a pattern to emulate.

I don't mean to get all VQR Blue here, but we've got a discounted subscription rate for MeFites. After all, the 1) Give away articles. 2) ?????? 3) Profit! business model isn't totally working out. :)
posted by waldo at 6:51 PM on February 10 [2 favorites]

Thanks Waldo! As it's a poem I didn't invest that much time. Still, the journal has an excellent site as it is.
posted by dawson at 7:50 PM on February 10

Wonderful! Thank you for posting this Bizurke. I found The Photographs of Walt Whitman very interesting.
posted by tellurian at 8:45 PM on February 10

waldo,

If you make the discount $5 instead of $4, we can use the five dollars to buy Valentine's Day gift memberships to Metafilter for our loved ones. Better than Pajamagrams!
posted by lukemeister at 8:59 PM on February 10

Hey, if Matt wants to talk about bundling MeFi memberships with VQR subscriptions, we can talk. :)
posted by waldo at 5:02 AM on February 11 [1 favorite]

bundling MeFi memberships with VQR subscriptions
Retrospectively or at the equivalent discount. I'm in, there's some great stuff here. Hell, I might subscribe anyway, there's some great material and I didn't know about this publication previously.
posted by tellurian at 5:44 AM on February 11