In developing the article-level and journal-level metadata in British Periodicals, ProQuest has been guided by the needs of scholars specialising in the study of historical periodicals. In addition to information transcribed directly from the printed source (Author, Article Title, Journal Title, Journal Editor, Volume, Issue, Date, Pagination, Place of Publication), the searchable metadata in British Periodicals captures information about the Frequency of Publication of the periodicals included, about the Content Type of particular articles (allowing users to search for Advertisements, Articles, Poems, Reviews, etc), and about the presence within each article of graphic elements (Cartoons, Maps, Printed Music etc). The metadata also includes Journal Subject indexing (using Library of Congress Subject Headings).
The British Periodicals metadata specification is essentially an extended version of the Periodicals Archive Online (PAO) metadata specification, and British Periodicals content can be searched and retrieved via ProQuest's PAO interface, along with other PAO content, in institutions that have access to both resources. ProQuest has also developed a dedicated British Periodicals standalone interface to allow users to search the British Periodicals collections separately from PAO using metadata fields that are unique to the British Periodicals article-level and journal-level metadata (such as Journal Editor or Frequency of Publication).
ProQuest has enriched the article-level metadata for British Periodicals with information from the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, which supplies attributions for anonymous and pseudonymous articles appearing in 42 nineteenth-century periodicals. Institutions that have access to ProQuest's electronic edition of the Wellesley Index can use the British Periodicals standalone interface to see additional metadata from Wellesley about the authorship of anonymous and pseudonymous articles appearing in the 42 Wellesley journals. Users in institutions with access to both resources can use a simple checkbox to include or exclude attribution information from the Wellesley Index when submitting search queries that include terms entered in the Author field. Crucially, the addition of attribution information from the Wellesley Index makes it possible to search for instances of a word or phrase in a given author's contributions to periodicals even where these originally appeared unsigned or over a pseudonym.
British Periodicals metadata is captured in an XML format which is then exported into a MARC format prior to integration within the product. Users can export article-level metadata from British Periodicals to a range of different Citation Management tools and produce references in accordance with a variety of different citation styles.
A durable URL in OpenURL format is available for each article. Users can generate durable URLs using the 'Durable URL for this page' link in British Periodicals. These can then be cut and pasted into reading lists, course pages etc to provide direct access to particular articles, and indeed to particular pages within articles.