London's Past Online
a bibliography of London history, created by the Centre for Metropolitan History
in association with the Royal Historical Society
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London's Past Online is a fully searchable, online bibliography of published material relating to the history of Greater London.  Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council Resource Enhancement Scheme (award no. RE/AN8717/APN13604) between 2002 and 2004, the project was managed by David Tomkins (Research Editor) and Eileen Sanderson (Assistant Research Editor), working under the general editorship of Heather Creaton, the former Deputy Director of the CMH. In 2005-6 generous additional funding from the Mercers' Company and the Goldsmiths' Company enabled the incorporation of archaeological references from the Bibliography of the Archaeology of Greater London (BAGL).

Core data for the project has been taken from Heather Creaton's Bibliography of Printed Works on London History to 1939 (London: Library Association Publishing Ltd, 1994) and its unpublished supplement, and the bibliography from her Sources for the History of London, 1939-45 (London, British Records Association, 1998). Working in close co-operation with the Royal Historical Society (RHS) Bibliography, the editors have exported the bibliographic records compiled for these publications to a separate dataset within the RHS Bibliography database. These records have been edited as necessary and the subject and person details have been mapped to correspond with the RHS Bibliography’s controlled vocabulary indexes.  The data, comprising approximately 31,000 records, went online towards the end of 2002 and can be searched in combination with relevant RHS Bibliography records that have been tagged as ‘London’ records. It is estimated that over 42,000 records are now available (late 2009) through the London’s Past Online database, inclusive of ‘shared’ records, though a number of these will be duplicates.

Although the London's Past Online project is no longer itself creating new records, new material on London history continues to be made available by the Royal Historical Society and (where titles concern the Irish in London) by Irish History Online. These include records for newly completed theses on London history.

London’s Past Online is available at www.history.ac.uk/cmh/lpol/.  It can also be accessed from the Centre for Metropolitan History website or the main search menu of the RHS Bibliography, both hosted by the Institute of Historical Research.  Though the data has been available online since late 2002, the structure and presentation of the site and search-pages were comprehensively revised in the months prior to the official launch in May 2003 so as to offer a more attractive and user-friendly interface.  The database offers three main search options: a ‘Simple search’, which allows for basic free-text searching using one or more keywords; a ‘Full search’, which allows one or more fields to be searched in combination and provides browsable indexed lists; and a ‘Search builder’, which enables greater flexibility for combined searching by allowing the user to construct personalised search forms and to incorporate Boolean operators.  The online database includes controlled vocabularies for both ‘subject’ and ‘place’, grouped within browsable classification schemes.  Search results can be sorted by author or by date of publication and searches can be saved and combined.  Output can be presented in a number of ways: brief display; full record details; bibliographical details only; or in XML format.

Additional features, including direct record links to corresponding entries in COPAC (which identifies the major research libraries that hold the item) and to a number of specific web resources, have been introduced and further links enabling simultaneous searching of relevant electronic resources are being considered as part of the project’s future development.  For selected records ‘shared’ with the RHS Bibliography, a link is provided to order the item from the British Library's Articles Direct service, the bibliographical details required to complete the order being placed into the British Library form automatically. 

To provide a secure long-term future, the RHS and IHR entered into a partnership with Brepols Publishers at the end of 2009 to continue the Bibliography as a subscription service under a new title: Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH). The Bibliography also acquired a new interface incorporating several new features, including auto-complete lists and enhanced export facilities, as well as offering considerably faster searching. In other respects, BBIH continues the practices and features developed in the compilation of the Annual Bibliographies and of the online RHS Bibliography. Entries are published as rapidly as possible, but are also reviewed by a team of expert academic section editors to ensure that the Bibliography remains attuned to scholars' needs. Linkage to online text and to library catalogues is provided wherever possible, and can be customised according to the user's location. BBIH also continues to use the classification scheme devised for the RHS Bibliography. Both London's Past Online and the RHS Bibliography will be replaced by BBIH from 1 January 2010. For further information on these changes and the subscriptions available, please see FAQs.