British History Online wins funding

British History Online (BHO) has been awarded funding by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as part of its Impact and Embedding programme. The award will allow BHO to carry out a detailed investigation of the usage of digital online resources, both in teaching and in research.

This is a subject which the BHO team has studied in the past: benchmarking studies were carried out in 2002, 2005 and 2009; these studies researched how digital resources are used, particularly in research. The new award allows BHO to broaden its previous approach by, for example, focusing more on teaching than previously.

Subsequently the project will make enhancements to BHO, based on what is learned in the analysis phase. Enhancements will be prioritised, based on the reported need for them and how resource-intensive they will be to implement.

This is a good moment for the IHR to be researching this topic, at the point when IHR Digital, the IHR's new digital publishing and consultancy arm, is about to be launched.

An initial project page can be found here.