Now Available!
Full-text PDFs of OA Articles
There are many benefits to being a member of the Ontario Archaeological Society. An important one is receiving the most recent issue of our peer-reviewed journal Ontario Archaeology. For more than 50 years OA has been the foremost published record of Ontarioís archaeological past and its myriad contributors have helped carve out a special place for this publication on the landscape of the archaeological literature of Northeastern North America. As members whose annual fees support the production and distribution of OA, you are keenly aware that these articles are timeless witnesses to our shared archaeological heritage.
Given the significance of the information contained in OA, the board of directors of the OAS approved a project whereby individual OA articles (as well as the archaeological articles of the precursor publications New Pages of History and New Pages of Prehistory) would be digitally captured and converted to a format that could be transmitted over the internet and made available to an even broader audience of readers potentially interested in Ontario archaeology or the insights that can be gained from its study.
For two or three years now, there has been an online database of OA article abstracts which allowed visitors to the OA webpage to search for keywords in the titles or abstracts (or even author name and OA volume) of past issues, thus identifying a volume and page range of the article(s) which fit their search parameters. While useful, this tool was limited in that they then had to find a copy of the volume in question, something which was not always easy to do.
During the fall of 2008 and more recently this past winter, Melennia Point has been working diligently to create PDFs of all New Pages and OA articles. As a result, the OA abstract search yields not only the full reference and abstract of the articles which correspond to the search parameters, but they also provide you with the possibly of downloading a PDF of the article if one exists.
The expected result of this significant investment is that someone on the other side of the world could read an article about the internal structuring of Huron longhouses in an instant and not have to worry about finding a library which 1) has a copy of the particular volume of OA with the article in it and 2) has an agreement with their institution for inter-library loans, if they even have such an institutional affiliation. The real expectation and hope is that the impact of all those wonderful thought-provoking OA articles will broaden its current reach.
At the same time, we also realize that there must remain some benefit to being a paid-up OAS member and so more recent issues of OA will not be posted before a certain amount of time has passed. In other words, the latest issues of OA will remain a benefit of membership. If eventually a Members Only section is added to the website, then members may be able to access recent OA articles in a gated, password-protected area of the website, but that is for another day.
In the meantime, go to the OA webpage and discover what youíve been missing!