This is important because we need an OCR solution if digital searching is to fulfill its promise.

That said, “nuns” did return plenty of useful results.

Anna is right about some results appearing with such gibberish that it is hard to dicern whether the hit is relevant. This dififuclty also appears tied to one’s search and the terms one is using. “Nuns” is far more generic a search than if someone was looking for a particular proper name, specific location, publication title, or the like. Also helpful when one encounters gibberish is the similarity of advertisements and news items across papers. If a result is hard to decipher in one title, it may be legible in the next result. Of course, some items are specific only to a single title, so this tip would not work in these cases.

Again, Burney almost certainly has many of the same OCR issues; its results, however, do not advertise the problem.

Additionally, though searching is free, the OCR snippets for each entry often contain too much gibberish to allow a cogent evaluation of the entry’s content. This matters when one must pay to view the actual content. Finally, navigation within entries is clumsy.

Still, it was fairly readable, and personal subscriptions make it accessible, which is huge.

Dwight is absolutely correct. We need metadata. Tierney’s article is illuminating, as Eleanor points out.

Some might be interested in reading James E. Tierney’s “The State of Electronic Resources for the Study of Eighteenth-Century British Periodicals: The Role of Scholars, Librarians, and Commercial Vendors” that appeared in The Age of Johnson, Vol. 21 (2012).