BBIH News

2 February 2012

Bibliography of British and Irish History update

The latest update to BBIH, published on 2 February 2012, contains 4,062 new records, of which 1,682 describe books and articles published in 2011-12.

Some 600 of the new records deal with Irish history, with the Irish Diaspora or with Anglo-Irish relations. 187 of the new records relate to the history of London, including information on newly completed theses relating to London provided by the Centre for Metropolitan History.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains nearly 514,000 records.

We plan that the next update will appear in early June 2012.

Posted 2 February 2012 | back to the top

5 October 2011

Bibliography of British and Irish History update

The latest update to BBIH, published on 4 October 2011, contains 5,833 new records, including 1,672 which describe books and articles published in 2011.

Over 700 of the new records deal with Irish history, with the Irish Diaspora or with Anglo-Irish relations, and 266 of the new records relate to the history of London.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains nearly 510,000 records.

Other news

We are pleased to welcome a new section editor, Dr Jason McElligott, of Marsh's Library, Dublin, who will edit records relating to Ireland since c.1640.

We are sorry that the redesign of the Archaeology Data Service's online archive means that we have had to withdraw article and volume level links to the full text of archaeological journals and series published there. The Archaeology Data Service hopes to establish stable links to individual items soon, at which point we plan to reintroduce article and volume level links. Meanwhile, we have provided links at journal or series level, from which you can browse to find particular articles or volumes.

We plan that the next update will appear in early February 2012.

Posted 5 October 2011 | back to the top

7 June 2011

Bibliography of British and Irish History update

The latest update to BBIH, launched on 7 June 2011, includes 5,620 new records, over half of which describe books and articles published in 2010-11.

Nearly 700 of the new records deal with Irish history, with the Irish Diaspora or with Anglo-Irish relations, and there are nearly 250 new records relating to the history of London.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains 504,000 records.

Other news

Our publishers, Brepols, have launched a YouTube channel with videos demonstrating how to get the most out of BBIH. Topics already covered include getting access to the online full text of items listed by the Bibliography, and using BBIH in conjunction with Zotero.

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

We plan that the next update will appear in early October 2011.

Posted 7 June 2011 | back to the top

7 February 2011

Bibliography of British and Irish History update

The latest update to BBIH, launched on 7 February 2011, includes over 4,500 new records, nearly 2,000 of which describe books and articles published in 2010.

Although Irish History Online is now published as a separate database, BBIH continues to include material on Anglo-Irish relations and publications on Irish history in general, and this update contains nearly 700 new records that deal with these areas.

Similarly, although the London's Past Online project is no longer itself creating new records, the update includes just over 200 new records relevant to London history, including information on newly completed theses relating to London provided by the Centre for Metropolitan History.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains over 498,000 records.

Other news

We are now including links to reviews published online by EH.net .

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

Improvements to the interface include an option, on the record view screen, to remove the classification details so as to give a more compact display.

We plan that the next update will appear in early June 2011.

Posted 7 February 2011 | back to the top

11 January 2011

New Academic Editor

We are delighted to announce that Professor Stephen Taylor of the University of Reading has taken over as Academic Editor of BBIH. His research focuses on the political and religious history of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and his work with online databases has included The Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835 and British State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings, 1540s to 1940s; he also worked on the Royal Historical Society Annual Bibliographies of British and Irish History and on the Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM which formed the foundation of the present database. Our previous Academic Editor, Dr Ian Archer, worked on the Bibliography for eleven years, and oversaw both the launch of the online Royal Historical Society Bibliography in 2002 and the transition to the new Bibliography of British and Irish History at the end of 2009. He will continue to act as a Literary Director of the RHS, and also as the early modern Section Editor of the Bibliography.

Posted 11 January 2011 | back to the top

11 October 2010

BBIH update

The latest update to the Bibliography of British and Irish History, launched on 11 October 2010, includes over 5,000 new records.

Nearly 3,000 of these relate to publications of 2009 and 2010. We are continuing our policy of including records as soon as we have confirmed that a book or article has been published and relates to British or Irish history. These records carry provisional indexing which has not yet been checked by our team of academic section editors (such records can be identified by a note: 'Record not yet reviewed by RHS section editor').

There are just over 600 new records relating to Irish history. Although Irish History Online is now published as a separate database, BBIH continues to include material on Anglo-Irish relations and publications on Irish history in general, although we will not be able to continue the coverage of Irish local history maintained by Irish History Online. As a result, users may notice some inconsistency of coverage of recent Irish history publications, some of which we hope to resolve soon. In the longer run, we hope to co-operate with Irish History Online in record collection.

Although the London's Past Online project is no longer itself creating new records, new material on London history continues to appear in BBIH. 200 of the new records in this update relate to London.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains 494,000 records.

New section editors

We are pleased to welcome two new members to our team of academic editors. Dr Beth Hartland, of King's College London, and Dr Matthew Kelly, of Southampton University, will be handling material on Irish history before and after c.1640 respectively.

Other news

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

In conjunction with our publishers, Brepols, we have also implemented some minor improvements: when records are exported, author surnames are no longer given in capitals throughout, to facilitate incorporation into users' personal bibliographies and reading lists; Greek characters and accented characters in languages such as Czech, Polish and Welsh, which were not all indicated in previous releases, are now correctly displayed.

We plan that the next update will appear in early February 2011.

Posted 11 October 2010 | back to the top

7 June 2010

BBIH update

The latest update to the Bibliography of British and Irish History, launched on 4 June 2010, includes compatibility with Zotero, and 9,774 new records.

Zotero compatibility

The Bibliography is now compatible with Zotero, an extension to the Firefox web browser produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University which enables you to collect, manage and cite information. A new section of help explains how Zotero can be used in conjunction with BBIH: to view this, follow the link in the right-hand pane of the BBIH search page.

New records

Of the 9,774 new records, just over 2,500 relate to Irish history, including the final batch of material from the second Irish History Online project, which ran from 2006-9. This batch completes the coverage of Writings on Irish History for 2006, as well as Irish History Online's project to extend coverage of the Irish diaspora, which involved research in libraries in the United States and Spain, as well as in Ireland. The number of records in the database relating to Irish history now totals 73,000.

3,244 of the new records relate to publications of 2009 and 2010. BBIH is continuing the policy, introduced by the RHS Bibliography, of including records as soon as we have confirmed that a book or article has been published and relates to British or Irish history. These records carry provisional indexing which has not yet been checked by our team of academic section editors (such records can be identified by a note: 'Record not yet reviewed by RHS section editor').

Although the London's Past Online project is no longer itself creating new records, new material on London history continues to appear in BBIH. 329 of the new records in this update relate to London.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains nearly 490,000 records.

Other news

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

We plan that the next update will appear in early October.

Posted 7 June 2010 | back to the top

26 January 2010

BBIH and European Historical Bibliographies

BBIH (like its predecessor, the RHS Bibliography) is participating in a project to promote co-operation among bibliographies covering history in some thirteen European countries. The project's website now contains proceedings of the conference held last month in the Hague, including contributions from projects in the Czech Republic, France, Germany and Switzerland, as well as a presentation describing the various techniques used to connect the RHS Bibliography to other resources on the web which have been continued and expanded in BBIH.

Posted 26 January 2010| back to the top

22 December 2009

Update to the new Bibliography of British and Irish History - freely available to all until 31 December

The new Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH), which will replace the RHS Bibliography and London's Past Online from 1 January 2010, has been updated. There are 3,000 additional titles and some problems with the geographical and subject indexing of the previous version have been corrected. Anyone may use the new BBIH for free until the end of 31 December 2009: go to http://apps.brepolis.net/LTool/Entrance.aspx?w=19&h=pwd and enter the following login details:

Username: BBIH07
Password: BBIH07

Institutional trials of BBIH by password or IP address are also still available. Please contact Brepols for more information.

As previously announced, BBIH is the result of a partnership between the Royal Historical Society, the Institute of Historical Research and Brepols Publishers. Access will be by subscription only from 1 January 2010 onwards, although both the Society and the Institute will be making an increased financial contribution to the Bibliography in order to keep subscriptions as low as possible. As subscription options are complex, you should consult Brepols for information about the cost of individual and institutional subscriptions.

If you have already received information about the individual trials from another website or mailing list, you will have been given different login details. Please continue to use these; the different details given here are simply to enable us to gauge the response to the different methods that have been used to advertise the trials.

Update on future plans for Irish History Online

Irish History Online will also be changing its publication arrangements, but will remain a free service at http://www.irishhistoryonline.ie/index.php. More information is available on Irish History Online's website. All the data currently included in Irish History Online will also continue to be available in BBIH and BBIH will continue to add records covering the main publications relating to Irish history and Anglo-Irish relations, but will not in future offer the detailed coverage of local history that is a feature of Irish History Online. We hope that the two projects will continue to cooperate in data collection.

Posted 22 December 2009| back to the top

24 November 2009

Individual free trials of the new Bibliography of British and Irish History are now available

As previously announced, the RHS Bibliography and London's Past Online will be replaced on 1 January 2010 by the new Bibliography of British and Irish History, the result of a partnership between the Royal Historical Society, the Institute of Historical Research and Brepols Publishers. We are now pleased to announce that free trials of the new Bibliography are available to individuals by going to http://apps.brepolis.net/LTool/Entrance.aspx?w=19&h=pwd and entering the following login details:

Username: BBIH07
Password: BBIH07

These details will remain valid until 31 December 2009.

Institutional trials by password or IP address are also still available. Please contact Brepols for more information.

You may wish to take up the issue of subscription with your librarians, who should contact Brepols for information on pricing (subscriptions for higher education institutions in the USA are based on the Carnegie classification of institutions, those in the UK on JISC banding). It is possible that the RHS Bibliography (as a free resource) has not been very visible to librarians, so you may need to engage in some local lobbying. It may also be worth pointing out to librarians that they should register their link resolvers with Brepols, to ensure access to full text where locally available: this will enable you to benefit fully from the enhanced functionality. Individual subscriptions are also available.

The trial version of the new Bibliography contains the same data as the current online RHS Bibliography. There are some issues relating to the subject indexing of the new Bibliography which we plan to resolve before the formal launch on 1 January.

Posted 24 November 2009| back to the top

Subsequent posts in this strand have been retained for information, but relate to the RHS Bibliography, which was superseded by the Bibliography of British and Irish History on 1 January 2010. All the data from the RHS Bibliography are included in the Bibliography of British and Irish History, as are most of the features, but the interface has been completely redesigned and additional features have been introduced.

10 October 2009

New records

This update contains just over 8,000 new records. 3,150 of these relate to Irish history, most of them being provided by Irish History Online. As a result, the bulk of Writings on Irish History for 2006 are now available, as well as Writings on Irish History for 1936-2005 and many additional titles on the Irish diaspora. The number of records in the database relating to Irish history now totals nearly 70,000; all these records are accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu. A final batch of data from the second phase of Irish History Online will be included in our next update (which will itself form part of the new Bibliography of British and Irish History). There are plans to continue the Irish History Online project at the Royal Irish Academy; it is hoped that a formal announcement can be made soon.

Of the remaining new records, 3,100 relate to publications of 2008 and 2009. The RHS Bibliography is continuing the policy, introduced at the end of 2008, of including records as soon as we have confirmed that a book or article has been published and relates to British or Irish history. These records carry provisional indexing which has not yet been checked by our team of academic section editors (such records can be identified by a note: 'Record not yet reviewed by RHS section editor').

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. 270 of the new records in this update relate to London and are available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu. These include records for newly completed theses on London history based on information provided by the Centre for Metropolitan History.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains nearly 470,000 records.

You can browse all the latest additions, including those from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, by broad period/country categories (based on the sections previously used for the printed RHS Annual Bibliography) by going to our browse page.

Other news

We have added a list of the series published by record societies and similar bodies that we include in the Bibliography to our list of regularly searched journals.

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

This is the last RHS Bibliography data upgrade before the launch of the Bibliography of British and Irish History on 1 January 2010. This new service will be a partnership between the Royal Historical Society, the Institute of Historical Research and Brepols Publishers. Trial subscriptions are now available from Brepols Publishers: email: brepolis@brepols.net ; web: www.brepolis.net.

Posted 10 October 2009 | back to the top

29 June 2009

The future of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography, Irish History Online and London's Past Online

The way in which the RHS Bibliography and London's Past Online are published will change from 1 January 2010. The new service, under a new name (Bibliography of British and Irish History [BBIH]) will be a partnership between the Royal Historical Society, the Institute of Historical Research and Brepols Publishers. The existing editorial team, with its close links to academic historians, will continue to be involved. Our aim is to maintain and to improve upon the standards and facilities of the current Bibliography, and of course to keep the Bibliography up-to-date by adding information about new publications, which currently entails adding well over 10,000 records each year.

As a result of these changes, the service will no longer be available free of charge, but the RHS and the IHR have concluded that this is the only way to secure the updating and improvement of the database in the long term, and thus to ensure the on-going usefulness of the work that has so far been funded by several charities (including the Leverhulme Trust and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), and by the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Research Council. The RHS and IHR will be increasing their financial commitment to the Bibliography in order to keep subscriptions as low as possible.

Our new partners, Brepols, who publish the International Medieval Bibliography, will also contribute their extensive experience in the online publication of bibliographies and reference works for scholars.

BBIH will be available by institutional and individual subscriptions, and we hope that our existing users will be able to use it. You can help by telling your library about the changes and encouraging them to subscribe to BBIH.

BBIH will be available for institutional trials from October 2009 and will be launched on 1 January 2010, when the existing Bibliography website will close.

The launch of BBIH will also entail changes to our partner project, Irish History Online. An announcement about this will be made later in the year.

We have prepared answers to some of the questions that we think users are most likely to ask. You can also read the press release from the RHS and the IHR, or see Brepols' leaflet advertising the forthcoming service. We will publish further news on the Bibliography website and through our mailing list as soon as it becomes available.

Posted 29 June 2009 | back to the top

9 May 2009

New records

This update contains nearly 5800 new records, of which just over half relate to publications of 2008 and 2009. We are continuing the policy, introduced at our last update, of including records as soon as we have confirmed that a book or article has been published and relates to British or Irish history. These records carry provisional indexing which has not yet been checked by our team of academic section editors (such records can be identified by a note: 'Record not yet reviewed by RHS section editor').

410 of the new records relate to Irish history, most of them being provided by Irish History Online. The number of records in the database relating to Irish history now totals nearly 66,500; all these records are accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

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. Nearly 300 of the new records in this update relate to London and are available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains over 460,000 records.

Quick search box on welcome page

A new quick search box on the RHS Bibliography welcome page enables you to search the Bibliography for a word or words. It works in the same way as the word search box on the Simple search page. However, to get the most from the Bibliography's extensive range of features, such as filtering by period covered and browsable indexes, you should explore the options on the RHS search menu, or on the specific search menus for Irish History Online and London's Past Online.

Faster searching for some subject indexing terms

We have changed the way in which Place index searches for "England", "England and Wales", "Britain", "United Kingdom (pre-1922 boundaries)", "United Kingdom (post-1921 boundaries)", "Ireland", "Scotland" and "Wales" are carried out so that searching is faster. Additionally, when you use the Place index field to search for "England", "England and Wales" or "Britain" you will get more results because such searches now return results for records indexed as covering larger areas which will contain a lot about England or Britain. We have also speeded up searching for the larger top-level subject classifications, so that broad searches such as Subject classification: "Economic activity and organization" in Place index: "England" for Period covered: 1500-1700 will now run more quickly.

OAI compatibility

Dublin Core versions of our records are now available using the Open Archives Initiative protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH).

Links to online text and services

We have extended our links to the full text journal articles freely available in the online library of the Archaeology Data Service by including links from our records for articles in London Archaeologist, 1-10 (1968-2005). We continue to update our links to other online resources: links to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography now include the lives of people who died in 2005, added to the Oxford DNB in January 2009.

Other news

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in autumn 2009.

Posted 9 May 2009 | back to the top

11 March 2009

Move to new server

The Bibliography has been moved to a new server which should give faster searching.

New search box on browsable indexes

On the browsable indexes of names, journal or series titles and indexing terms we have replaced the A-Z links with a search box that you can use to search for a particular term in the list.

Other news

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade later in the spring.

Posted 11 March 2009 | back to the top

22 December 2008

New records

In response to comments from users, we have adopted a new policy towards releasing new records from the RHS database. We are including records as soon as we have confirmed that a book or article has been published and relates to British or Irish history. These records carry provisional indexing which has not yet been checked by our team of academic section editors (such records can be identified by a note: 'Record not yet reviewed by RHS section editor'). As a result, this update is much larger than previous ones, and includes nearly 10,900 new records; just over 3000 of these cover publications of 2008. We would be very pleased to know whether users find this earlier release of provisionally indexed records helpful. You can contact us by using our feedback form, or by e-mail.

Nearly 1127 of the new records relate to Irish history. These include virtually all of the remaining records from Writings on Irish History for 2005, provided by Irish History Online, of which the first part was included in our previous release. The number of records in the database relating to Irish history now totals over 66,000; all these records are accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

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. In addition, this update includes information on newly completed theses relating to London history supplied by the Centre for Metropolitan History. 687 of the new records in this update relate to London and are available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains over 456,000 records.

New download in EndNote format

On the detailed record display, you can now choose to download records in EndNote format, and save the file for import into the EndNote bibliographical software package.

Links to online text and services

We have extended our links to the full text journal articles freely available in the online library of the Archaeology Data Service by including links from our records for articles in Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 35-70 (1931-80). We continue to update our links to other online resources, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford Scholarship Online and British History Online, as new material appears there.

Other news

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

An article on the history of the RHS Bibliography by the General Editor, Ian Archer, has been published on the Institute of Historical Research's Making History website.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in spring 2009.

Posted 22 December 2008 | back to the top

7 November 2008

New tutorials

To help you to get the most out of the Bibliography, we have introduced new tutorials that you can either view online or download to your own computer, either as Word documents or in pdf format.

Further plans

Our data upgrade should be released soon.

Posted 7 November 2008 | back to the top

30 October 2008

New links to Google Books

We have introduced new links to the detailed display of records for books and for recent articles in books. These links search Google Books for the work that you are viewing. If you follow the link you will be presented with a Google results page which tells you if there are any results and also indicates whether you can see online text, and, if so, whether full or limited view is available.

Further plans

We will be introducing further developments, and publishing a data upgrade, in the next few weeks.

Posted 30 October 2008 | back to the top

2 July 2008

New records

This update includes just over 4800 new records; just over 1700 of these cover publications of 2007-8.

1127 of the new records relate to Irish history. These include around half of the Writings on Irish History for 2005, provided by Irish History Online; the remainder of the records from the 2005 Writings will be included in our next update. The number of records in the database relating to Irish history now totals 65,500; all these records are accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

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. 185 of the new records in this update relate to London and are available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains nearly 446,000 records.

New or improved functionality

We have added to the RHS search menu an option to search for material relating to Scottish history. This marks our continuing co-operation with the Scottish Historical Review Trust which should enhance the Bibliography's coverage of Scottish history.

You can now restrict searches from the Simple search form by period covered.

When you use the Simple search form or the Subject (free text) field on the Full search form or Search builder some words that appear so frequently in the database that they will slow down your search while doing little to refine your results are now ignored. These stop words are: 'a', 'an', 'and', 'Britain', 'England', 'history', 'in', 'of', 'or', 'the', 'to'. If you wish to find a title containing these words, you can use the Title field on the Full search form or Search builder. You can also carry out Place index searches for 'England' or 'Britain' on the Full search form or Search builder provided that you combine them with other search terms, although the results may be disappointing because important work on, for example, the social history of England or Britain may be contained in works covering the whole of Britain and Ireland which have been indexed with 'United Kingdom (pre-1922 boundaries)'.

Our Search builder, which enables you to build your own search form, repeating fields as often as you like, and to customize the Boolean operators that you use, so that you can select OR or AND NOT, can now be reached directly from the search menu.

When you search for an Author or Person as subject on the Full search form or the Search builder, our software will now carry out your search even if you do not enter the surname first, although using our recommended surname first format will still produce the most precise results.

When you select Latest additions from the Search menu and use the index buttons for authors, journals/series or persons as subjects on the Full search form or Search builder, the lists that you see are now confined to terms used in the latest additions. Also, if you use one of the hyperlinks on the detailed record display to search for a Subject classification or Place index term, the search is now carried out on the latest additions only.

When your search produces more than 100 results, so that the Brief display is spread over two or more pages, you can now mark records on more than one page to view in detail, although you cannot view more than 150 records in detail at once. When you move from one page of results to another, the new page should now be generated more quickly.

To make it easier for you to send feedback, the detailed display of each record now includes a link to our online comment form. We also indicate how to cite the record if you wish to send a link to somebody, or to include it in a web page.

We have improved the way that we check whether you are in a United Kingdom Higher Education Institution with a link resolver, so that, if you enter the bibliography via a link from another resource, such as the Oxford DNB, rather than through our Search menu, we can detect whether you have a resolver that is registered with the United Kingdom OpenURL Router, and the links to full text services that you see will be customized accordingly.

New links to online text and services

We have introduced links to the online Who was Who for historical personages appearing in our detailed results display and in our browsable indexes of personal names. These links are available only where a person also appears in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, but we have updated our links to the online Oxford DNB to take account of their May release. A subscription is required to use both Who was Who and the Oxford DNB online. We are very grateful to Oxford DNB for their help in establishing and maintaining these links.

We have extended our links to the full text journal articles freely available in the online library of the Archaeology Data Service by including links from our records for articles in Medieval Archaeology, 1-50 (1957-2006). Links for Surrey Archaeological Collections and Sussex Archaeological Collections have been updated to take account of material newly added by the ADS Library. We are also continuing to update our links to other online resources, including Oxford Scholarship Online and British History Online, as new material appears there.

Other news

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in October 2008, although we are also planning to release additional display formats, to make it easier to import records into bibliographical software, later this summer.

Posted 2 July 2008 | back to the top

29 February 2008

New records

This update includes 8400 new records; just over 2200 of these cover publications of 2007 with a further 1479 covering works published in 2006.

Nearly 2200 of the new records relate to Irish history. The bulk of these comprise the Writings on Irish History for 2004, provided by Irish History Online, but some more recent publications are also included, together with almost 500 new records on the Irish abroad, including references collected in North American libraries. The number of records in the database relating to Irish history now totals 63,600; all these records are accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

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. 413 of the new records in this update relate to London and are available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains 441,000 records.

Other news

We have added links to the abstracts and/or full text of journal articles available in the online library of the Archaeology Data Service. Journals covered so far are Archaeologia Scotica (vols. 1-4, 1792-1857), Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (vols. 1-129, 1851-1999), Surrey Archaeological Collections (vols. 90-92, 2003-5: abstracts and microfiche supplements only) and Sussex Archaeological Collections (vols. 137-44, 1999-2006), together with volumes from the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland Monograph series that appear in the Bibliography. The Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland links have been generated automatically from our bibliographical data, and some links may not work as a result of our treating some sections of the journal as a separate article where the ADS has not done so. Please let us know of any errors and we will endeavour to correct them. We hope to add more links to the ADS Library in future updates.

We have also added links where books have been published online by Oxford Scholarship Online. A subscription is required to view the full text at Oxford Scholarship Online, but tables of contents and abstracts are free for anyone to view.

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in May or June 2008.

Posted 29 February 2008 | back to the top

1 February 2008

New thematic lists

We have introduced new thematic lists that enable you to see, with a single click, what has been written about each of the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh counties, and about twentieth-century British prime ministers. All of these searches can also be carried out from the Bibliography's Full Search form but we hope that the lists will be a useful short-cut, especially for users who are new to the Bibliography, and we plan to introduce more in the future if the response is positive.

Next data update

We plan to carry out the next data update later this month, when, as well as adding the usual new titles on British and Irish history, we will be adding about 400 new records relating to the Irish abroad from Irish History Online, many of them collected in North American libraries.

Posted 1 February 2008 | back to the top

20 December 2007

New links to help you find library copies and online text

We have introduced new links on the detailed record display to help users to find library copies, or to find online text from services such as JSTOR or on publishers' sites. Our new OpenURL "Find in a Library" and COinS links can take you to the relevant entry in a library catalogue or to locally available electronic text in a couple of clicks.

Performance of the links will depend on what institution you belong to (if any), and whether you are working in your institution or elsewhere. The "Find in a Library" links use the OCLC OpenURL resolver registry, and we hope that users in North America, in particular, will find them useful. Users who wish to employ a resolver that is not registered with OCLC or with the United Kingdom OpenURL Router, and users who are working at home, may find the COinS links especially useful if they also use the Firefox web browser.

We provide the new links if the record represents an article in a journal for which we know the ISSN, a book for which we know the ISBN, or an article in such a book. They supplement the existing OpenURL links using the OpenURL Router's registry of United Kingdom Higher and Further Education institutional OpenURL resolvers or the EDINA GetCopy resolver.

Find in a Library links

OCLC OpenURL resolver registry links are indicated by a blue "Find in a Library" button. When you click on the button the OCLC registry is checked to see if you are in a library whose OpenURL resolver is included there; if you are, then details of the Bibliography record which you are viewing are sent to your library's resolver and you should see options to locate copies or view online text similar to those that you see when you are using your own library's catalogue - for example, one or two clicks can take you to the full text of an article on JSTOR.

If you do not have an OpenURL resolver that is registered with OCLC, the "Find in a Library" button will work in the same way as the former search of OCLC WorldCat via Google. You will be taken to a WorldCat "Find in a Library" page showing details of the work for which you are searching; if this is the first time that you have used the service, you will need to specify your location, but you will then be able see the OCLC member libraries in your area that hold a copy of the journal or book for which you are searching, which may in turn enable you to find out about library holdings or to view online text. However, whereas the Google links previously provided were able to search for multiple ISBNs, the OpenURL syntax means that the new links can search only for the first ISBN listed. However, Google Toolbar users can use the AutoLink feature to link any 10-digit ISBN displayed on a results page to relevant pages from OCLC WorldCat or from leading book suppliers. You can learn more about how Google Toolbar works with ISBNs at http://www.worldcat.org/toolbars/default.jsp, where there are links to download pages.

We have retained the lookup of the OpenURL Router registry of OpenURL resolvers in United Kingdom Higher and Further Education institutions, although these links are now presented on the same line as the COPAC and "Find in a Library" links. If your institution's OpenURL resolver is in the OpenURL Router registry, then you will see a direct link to your OpenURL resolver; if your institution's OpenURL resolver is not in the OpenURL Router registry, then you will see (for articles in journals only) a link to EDINA's GetCopy resolver. These facilities will be most useful for users in the United Kingdom, whereas the OCLC resolver registry currently contains a higher proportion of North American library resolvers, although many British libraries are also registering.

If your library has an OpenURL resolver that is registered with OCLC, we would be interested to know how well the "Find in a Library" links function in comparison with resolver links in your own library catalogue.

If your library has an OpenURL resolver that is not registered with OCLC, you may like to encourage your IT librarians to register their resolver - registration is open to all libraries whether or not they are members of OCLC.

Alternatively, if your library has an OpenURL resolver that is not registered with OCLC or with the OpenURL Router, or you wish to consult your resolver when you are outside your own institution (for example, when you are working at home), and you are a Firefox user, you can use our COinS links, described below, and configure the OpenURL Referrer to use your preferred resolver.

COinS with OpenURL Referrer

The OpenURL Referrer is a browser extension that can take citations on the web and convert them to direct links to your local library's databases and services. To exploit this, we have introduced COinS (Context Objects in Spans) into our detailed display, which will be recognised as OpenURL links by the OpenURL Referrer. If you have the OpenURL Referrer installed in your browser, the COinS OpenURL links will appear at the end of the line that also carries the COPAC link (if you do not have the OpenURL Referrer installed, you will not see anything). You may be familiar with COinS from COPAC or from Wikipedia, where COinS often appear in the "References" section of an article. You can learn more, and download the browser extension for Mozilla Firefox version 1.0 or higher, or for Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6 or higher, from OCLC Openly Informatics.

These new links will be most useful for Firefox users. In Firefox, once you have installed the OpenURL Referrer, you can configure it to send details of the record that you are viewing to the resolver of your choice by selecting "Tools" and then "Add-ons" from the Firefox menu. This means that, for example, you can configure the links to consult your own library's resolver while you are working at home, when the links via the OpenURL Router or OCLC OpenURL resolver registries will not be able to take you to your library's resolver. The OCLC Openly Informatics website provides detailed help on downloading and configuring the OpenURL Referrer for Firefox (if the suggested procedure of querying the OCLC OpenURL resolver registry does not enable you to find appropriate resolver details, which will apply if you are working at home, your library should be able to provide you with the details needed to configure the Referrer).

Internet Explorer users will need to click on "Tools" and then "Insert OpenURLs" in the Explorer menu to activate the referrer once it has been installed. This needs to be done on each page on which you wish to use the referrer. The referrer cannot be manually configured in Internet Explorer, so the links will duplicate the "Find in a Library" links, although the COinS links use a different version of the OpenURL syntax so the results may vary slightly. The OCLC Openly Informatics website again provides further information on downloading and activating the OpenURL Referrer for Internet Explorer.

Posted 20 December 2007 | back to the top

27 October 2007

New records

This update includes nearly 5400 new records; about half of these cover publications of 2006-7.

1605 of the new records relate to Irish history. The bulk of these comprise the Writings on Irish History for 2003, provided by Irish History Online. The total number of records in the database relating to Irish history now amounts to 61,230; all these records are accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

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. In addition, the current update includes records for recently completed theses on London history derived from information compiled by the Centre for Metropolitan History. 298 of the new records in this update relate to London and are available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains nearly 433,000 records.

Other news

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in early 2008.

Posted 27 October 2007 | back to the top

3 July 2007

New records

This update includes nearly 3900 new records; 1765 of these cover publications of 2006-7.

221 of the new records relate to Irish history, including 119 generated by the new Irish History Online project to improve coverage of the Irish Diaspora. All records relating to Irish history are accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

Although the London's Past Online project is not 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. 226 of the new records in this update relate to London and are available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains over 427,000 records.

New links with the British Library

In addition to bibliographical data derived from the British Library's inside article database, the RHS Bibliography is now, by kind permission of the British Library, downloading data about monographs from the electronic British National Bibliography. As well as helping to ensure the accuracy and completeness of our bibliographical data, this is enabling us to include more new monographs. We continue, however, to add our own indexing (including an indication of period covered, and terms drawn from our subject classification scheme), and we also continue to obtain bibliographical data from many other sources (including the direct inspection of local and specialized history journals not included in other online services), with the aim of making our coverage as complete and timely as possible.

Links to the British Library from the detailed record display now lead to the Library's new British Library Direct service, which offers electronic delivery of the last five years' articles from the 20,000 most frequently requested journals held by the British Library document supply centre. These links enable you to order the item from the British Library and the bibliographical details needed to complete your order are placed into the British Library form automatically. Copyright and handling fees will be due to the British Library for any items ordered using this service; if you have any questions about the service, please consult the British Library.

ISBNs now shown for articles in books

ISBNs are now shown in the detailed display for articles in books, where we hold the information in our data. This information was always available by following the link to the record for the book containing the article, but we hope that adding the information to the article record will help Google Toolbar users, who can use the AutoLink feature to link ISBNs to relevant pages from OCLC WorldCat or from leading book suppliers. You can learn more about how Google Toolbar works with ISBNs at http://www.worldcat.org/toolbars/default.jsp, where there are links to download pages.

Other news

Ex Libris have included the bibliography in the MetaLib KnowledgeBase. If your library or institution uses MetaLib, but has not yet activated the RHS Bibliography connection, and you wish to see it included, please contact your librarian.

As in all updates, the indexing of many records initially published in the CD-ROM version of the RHS Bibliography has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in autumn 2007 when we hope to include the Writings on Irish History for 2003, compiled by Irish History Online.

Posted 3 July 2007 | back to the top

17 April 2007

Improved Z39.50 searching using BookWhere

We have revised our Z39.50 settings to give better results with BookWhere, a popular Z39.50 client.

Posted 17 April 2007 | back to the top

24 February 2007

New Arts and Humanities Research Council grant

We are pleased to announce that the RHS Bibliography has received a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to fund the continuing development of the bibliography as a free online resource for three years from 1 January 2007. As well as continuing to keep the bibliography up-to-date, we plan to develop more item-to-item linkage to digitized copies of works that we have indexed. Among the partners identified are the Enhanced British Parliamentary Papers on Ireland project and the Oxford University-Google project to digitize nineteenth-century publications, where we plan to link to online texts of enduring value to historians (including record society series) – at the same time we will be trying to promote awareness of the bibliography among local history and record societies. We will be helped in this by our links to British History Online which is also developing its contacts in the same area. We will also be exploring increased ‘exposure’ of the data to internet search engines such as Google and we will be developing a series of online tutorials which will assist those new to the database.

Co-operation with Scottish Historical Review Trust

This update includes the first titles edited by a new team at Stirling University, led by Dr Emma Macleod and working under the auspices of the Scottish Historical Review Trust. A redevelopment of our online interface planned for 2007 should yield a number of improvements, including the introduction of a “Scottish material only” option on the search menu similar to those already available for Irish history and the history of London. The bibliography’s Scottish coverage will be improved, but those who have previously used the Scottish Historical Review's printed lists of new articles will also have access to a more frequently updated service with more extensive subject indexing that will also be enriched by the wider searching for Scottish material in non-specialist journals that co-operation with the RHS Bibliography will make possible. We hope that this might become, along with the existing and very successful co-operation between the RHS Bibliography and Irish History Online, a model for co-operation with similar projects concerned with the history of particular countries, regions or topics.

New records

This update includes over 4500 new records; some 1500 of these cover publications of 2006-7.

This update includes 1140 new records relating to Irish history, mostly provided by Irish History Online. These include the great bulk of titles from the Writings on Irish History for 2002 that had not already appeared in the database, so that the database now includes virtually the entire contents of the Writings on Irish History for 1936-2002. Over 59,000 titles on Irish history are now accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

Although the London's Past Online project is not 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. This update contains 165 new records relating to London and a total of 41,300 records is now available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains over 424,000 records.

Enhanced Person as subject index

When you search by Person as subject using either the Full search form or the Search builder your results will now include works by the person for whom you are searching that are contained in the bibliography, as well as works about them. This will apply where we have identified that people in our index of authors are the same as those listed in our Person as subject index; we will be increasing the number of such identifications with each update.

Z39.50 compatibility

We are working on improving the bibliography's performance in conjunction with the BookWhere Z39.50 client. We will be adding some guidance on using the bibliography through BookWhere to the website soon.

Other news

As in previous updates, the indexing of many existing records has been improved. As well as enhancing the indexing of numerous individual records, we have also where possible (and where it would supplement existing indexing) converted into terms from the current subject classification scheme the subject "themes" given to records from the Writings on British History for 1946-74 when they were included in the 1998 CD-Rom edition; these "themes" were not previously included in the online version. This extends the work carried out in 2006 on the records from the 1975-92 Annual Bibliographies, and has resulted in additional subject classification terms being applied to nearly 13,000 records.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in May 2007.

Posted 24 February 2007 | back to the top

31 October 2006

New batch of data from Irish History Online

This update includes over 8000 new records from Irish History Online, mostly from the Writings on Irish History for 1936-69. The online database now includes the entire contents of the Writings on Irish History for 1936-2001, covering all the Writings previously published in print and on microfiche, as well as some more recent material. A total of 58,000 titles on Irish history are now accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

New Irish History Online project

A new Irish History Online project commenced in October 2006 with the aim of improving coverage of the Irish diaspora, including foreign publications. Dr Frank Cullen is the editor of this new project which, like the first stage of Irish History Online, is based at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, under the direction of Professor Jacqueline Hill. The new project will also add information on new publications on Irish history more generally, with the aim of creating an online current bibliography of Irish history.

Other new records

Apart from the new records from Irish History Online, this update includes 5100 other new records; nearly 2900 of these cover publications of 2005-6.

379 of the new records relate to the history of Greater London, so that a total of over 41,000 records is now available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu. Newly added records include recently completed theses on London history derived from information compiled by the Centre for Metropolitan History.

You can browse all the latest additions, including those from Irish History Online, by broad period/country categories (based on the sections previously used for the printed RHS Annual Bibliography) by going to our browse page.

Other news

As in previous updates, the indexing of many existing records has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next update in January 2007.

Posted 31 October 2006 | back to the top

12 July 2006

Z39.50 connectivity and EndNote connection file

Z39.50 is a standard that allows different information retrieval systems to communicate effectively behind the scenes (for full information about Z39.50, see http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/). The RHS Bibliography has now been set up as a Z39.50 server which means that, as well as searching the Bibliography through its own interface, it is possible to search the Bibliography using a Z39.50 client and, depending on the client used, to combine results from the Bibliography with results from other databases and to reformat them as required.

Posted 12 July 2006 | back to the top

30 May 2006

New batch of data from Irish History Online

This update includes just over 4300 new records from Irish History Online, mostly from the Writings on Irish History for 1970-79, so that the database now includes the entire contents of the Writings on Irish History for 1970-2001. Nearly 50,000 titles on Irish history are now accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

Other new records

Apart from the new records from Irish History Online, this update includes just over 6600 other new records; 2668 of these cover publications of 2005-6.

972 of the new records relate to London history. Many of these have been derived by London's Past Online from the Bibliography of the Archaeology of Greater London; all significant articles from this database are now included in London's Past Online, although we have omitted some very short items from BAGL, such as minutes of meetings of archaeological bodies or accounts of visits. A total of over 40,800 records is now available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

The complete database, including titles from Irish History Online and London's Past Online, now contains just over 407,000 records.

Extended links to other online resources

We have further extended the links from the detailed record display and from the Person as subject browsable index to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to the British National Register of Archives. There are links to over 4200 more lives in the Oxford DNB (bringing the total number of linked lives to almost 10,000), and links to 2000 further NRA listings (bringing the total to 5500).

Z39.50 compatibility for EndNote users

This update includes fields specially adapted for searching and display using Z39.50 clients such as EndNote, so that users will be able to search the database alongside other resources and incorporate the results into their own bibliographies. Full details will be announced shortly.

Other news

As in previous updates, the indexing of many existing records has been improved. As well as enhancing the indexing of numerous individual records, we have also where possible converted into terms from the current subject classification scheme the subject "themes" given to records from the RHS Annual Bibliographies for 1975-92 when they were included in the 1998 CD-Rom edition, which were not previously included in the online version. This has resulted in the addition of subject classification terms to nearly 10,000 records.

We have modified the place indexing terms used for records covering the period since 1801 which do not have a specific geographical focus. Instead of "Britain and Ireland" and "Britain and Northern Ireland", we are now using "United Kingdom (pre-1922 boundaries)" and "United Kingdom (post-1921 boundaries)" respectively. We have done this in order to ensure that text searches for "Ireland", done either from the Simple search form, or using the Subject (free text) field on the Full search form or Search builder, will give manageable and meaningful results. However, "Britain and Ireland" and "Britain and Northern Ireland" have been retained as non-preferred terms, so when you search for them in the Place index field, records on the period since 1801 will still be returned (this will also be the case if you search for "Britain" in the Place index field with truncation turned on - this is automatic on the Search form). Note that such searches can be done only in conjunction with other criteria if you are searching the whole database, because of the excessive number of results that are otherwise involved. We also continue to recommend that you should not use "Britain" in the Simple search form or in the Subject (free text) field on the other search forms.

We plan to carry out the next data upgrade in October 2006.

Posted 30 May 2006 | back to the top

8 April 2006

New search method for Place index

When you use the Place index search on the Full search form, your search is now carried out with right truncation. This means that, if you type in a place name without consulting the index to see the full form used in the Bibliography, you should usually obtain results. For example, 'Manchester' will now give results; you do not have to use 'Manchester (Lancashire)'. Also, searching for 'Manchester' will include other place names beginning 'Manchester', such as 'Manchester, diocese of' or 'Manchester (Lancashire), Portico Library'. This also means that, if you search for a county town such as 'Leicester', you will obtain results for the county of Leicestershire and places in it, as well as for Leicester itself, since the county name is an extension of the name of the county town. However, you can still consult the browsable index and use the full form of the name if you wish to search more precisely. For example, searching for 'Leicester (Leicestershire)' will limit your results to records about Leicester itself, although, as truncation is still in operation, your results will include places and institutions in Leicester identified by the Bibliography, such as 'Leicester (Leicestershire), University'. On the Search builder, you have the choice of using right truncation or of limiting your search to exact matches.

We have also changed the text associated with the Author and Person as subject fields on the Full search form, and with the truncated search of these fields on the Search builder, to include an example of the truncated search that you can use in these fields. However, searching of these fields operates in exactly the same way as before.

Posted 8 April 2006 | back to the top

24 January 2006

Data upgrade

Nearly 4000 new records, including almost 1000 relating to the history of London, and 528 relating to Irish history. The new records relating to London history are mostly derived from the Bibliography of the Archaeology of Greater London, which the London's Past Online project is currently processing.

Other news

We have extended the links from the detailed record display and from the Person as subject browsable index to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; these now include figures who died in 2002 who are included in the Dictionary, including the late Queen Mother and the historian, Roy Porter. We have changed the format of Person as subject names to include the date of birth (where known), but the searching process remains unchanged.

As in previous updates, the indexing of many existing records has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next update in May 2006.

24 January 2006 | back to the top

20 October 2005

New batch of data from Irish History Online

This update includes 1788 new records from Irish History Online, mostly from the Writings on Irish History for 2001, so that the database now includes the entire contents of the Writings on Irish History for 1980-2001. We have also improved the identification of Irish history items in the RHS data, so that nearly 45,000 titles on Irish history are now accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

Other new records

Apart from the new records from Irish History Online, this update includes just over 4000 other new records; 2039 of these cover publications of 2004-5.

339 of the new records relate to London history, so that a total of over 38,600 records is now available using the London material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the London's Past Online search menu.

New links to other online resources

We have introduced links to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and to the personal names index of the British National Register of Archives. These are provided on the detailed record display where historical figures are included in the indexing, and are also available on the browsable index associated with the Person as subject field. Reciprocal links are provided by the Oxford DNB and should soon be available from the National Register of Archives site. Links are not yet provided for all people listed by the bibliography whose lives are contained in the Oxford DNB, and links to the NRA are currently provided only for those for whom a link to the Oxford DNB exists - we will be developing this service further in future updates.

We are now able to detect if users of the bibliography are in an institution with an OpenURL resolver, in which case links are provided to resources tailored to your local holdings and subscriptions. If we identify that you are in a UK Higher Education institution with an OpenURL resolver that has been registered with EDINA, and the record that you are viewing possesses an ISBN (for books or articles in books) or an ISSN (for journal articles), a link is provided on the detailed display so that you can use your institution's resolver to search for local resources relating to the record that you are viewing. These may include local library holdings or online full text to which your institution has subscribed.

CrossRef has been added by EDINA to the online full text services searched by the GetCopy links. CrossRef searches several publishers' sites for the article described by the record that you are viewing; you should be able to view the full text if your library or institution has a subscription to the journal. GetCopy links are provided in the detailed display of records for articles in many journals if we do not detect that your institution has its own resolver.

Other news

As in previous updates, the indexing of many existing records has been improved.

We plan to carry out the next update in late December 2005.

Posted 20 October 2005 | back to the top

12 July 2005

External links enhanced

Project MUSE has been added by EDINA to the online full text services searched by the GetCopy links. GetCopy links are provided in the detailed display of records for articles in many journals.

We hope that JSTOR will soon be added to the targets searched by GetCopy.

Posted 12 July 2005 | back to the top

30 June 2005

Online user survey

We have been conducting a survey of users' experiences of the bibliography to help us to plan improvements and future developments. The survey closed on 2 August 2005 and we are now analyzing the responses. We are very grateful to those users who completed the survey.

WorldCat links

We have added links to OCLC WorldCat (via Google) to the detailed results display of records carrying an ISBN or ISSN. You can obtain a list of WorldCat member libraries that hold the item - if you are in the USA, you can use your state or postcode to customize the list of libraries for your particular area, but UK users can also limit the list of libraries to the UK. You can then link through to the library catalogues with holding information and, in some cases, ordering facilities or access to online text. WorldCat gives access to a narrower range of UK libraries than COPAC does, but we hope that US users, in particular, will find WorldCat useful.

Posted 30 June 2005 | back to the top

27 May 2005

New links to online text

When you view records for articles in many journals, we are now providing links to the EDINA GetCopy openURL resolver - this passes information about the record that you are viewing to a number of providers of online text (including EBSCOhost, Ingenta Select, and several publishers' sites), and can determine whether the text of the article that you are viewing is available online - if you are in an institution which subscribes to the appropriate service, you should be able to click through to the online article text (in many cases, UK higher education users with Athens authorization will also be able to use this when off campus). You can consult EDINA's own website for more information.

We are planning to extend this service to include links to the openURL resolvers provided by an increasing number of UK academic libraries - this will give users in those institutions access to a list of resources, both local and online, tailored to their particular institution.

New batch of data from Irish History Online

This update includes 8260 new records from Irish History Online, so that the database now includes the entire contents of the Writings on Irish History for 1980-2000 - this means that the database now includes titles accumulated since publication of the printed Writings ceased. Over 40,000 titles on Irish history are now accessible using the Irish material only option on the RHS search menu, or through the Irish History Online search menu.

Other new developments

Apart from the new records from Irish History Online, this update includes just over 6000 other new records; nearly 2500 of these cover publications of 2004-5.

As in previous updates, the indexing of numerous existing records has been improved.

We are pleased to have welcomed three new section editors to the Royal Historical Society bibliographies in the last few months - Dr Alex May (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), handling Imperial and Commonwealth history since 1783; Dr Karen Stöber (University of Wales at Aberystwyth), handling Welsh history before 1536, and other titles in Welsh; and Dr Elisabeth Van Houts (University of Cambridge), handling English history, 1066-1500. Click here for a full list of Royal Historical Society bibliographies section editors.

We are now incorporating an increasing range of electronic journals, including:

The Electronic British Library Journal
Electronic Journal of Australian and New Zealand History [peer reviewed articles only]
The Heroic Age: a journal of early medieval Northwestern Europe
History of Intellectual Culture
International Journal of Naval History
Journal of the Australian War Memorial
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
Journal for Maritime Research
Living Spring Journal [refereed articles and selected others only]
Renaissance forum : An Electronic Journal of Early-Modern Literary and Historical Studies
University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History

We have added links to British History Online where the full text of items is available there. Unpublished items included in British History Online have been added to the bibliography for the sake of completeness. We will continue to add links as new material is added to British History Online.

We are now adding links to reviews published by CERCLES: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone for works which have been reviewed there.

Update plans

Further updates are planned for late summer or early autumn and December 2005.

Posted 27 May 2005 | back to the top

8 and 12 April 2005

Move to new server

The database was transferred to a new server on 5 April, giving faster searching. As a result you should now be able to search all the available data from any of the top level terms in the subject classification scheme. We still recommend caution when using some place indexing terms because they may produce too many results to be processed.

The feedback form is working again from today (12 April).

Irish History Online website

The Irish History Online project now has its own website.

Update plans

We plan to publish the next update of the bibliographical data in mid-May 2005. This is expected to include not only new material on publications of 2004-5 from the Royal Historical Society Bibliography, but also a further batch of material from Irish History Online, adding a further ten years' worth of publications on Irish History, so that the very detailed coverage provided by Irish History Online will extend to publications of 1981-2000.

The next update will also incorporate improved linking to the online full text of journal articles.

Posted 8 and 12 April 2005 | back to the top

31 December 2004

Data upgrade

4083 new records, including 344 new records relating to the history of London and 65 relating to the history of Ireland. Nearly 2000 of the new records cover titles published in 2003-4.

The current update does not include any new records from Irish History Online, but it is planned that a further batch of records from Irish History Online will be added in spring 2005.

The indexing of many existing titles has been improved.

We have amended the subject classification scheme. Most terms and their relationships remain unchanged but we have reduced the number of top level terms to make it easier to browse the scheme from the top level.

We have begun to add links to the H-Albion website for books included in the bibliography which have been reviewed by H-Albion. For the time being, these links will be confined to reviews newly published by H-Albion, although our long-term plan is to provide links for all the works on British and Irish history reviewed by H-Albion.

Posted 31 December 2004 | back to the top

31 August 2004

Launch of Irish History Online

Irish History Online has been launched, adding 14,000 titles to the bibliography. These records represent the titles from Writings on Irish History for 1989 to 1998 (compiled by Máirín Cassidy and Ciaran Nicholson) which were not already included in the database; the records have been indexed using the bibliography's subject indexing scheme and each has been given an indication of period covered. At the same time, the information about many of the titles from the 1989-98 Writings on Irish History that were already in the Royal Historical Society data has been improved by the Irish History Online team. When you select the new Irish material only option on the search menu, you have access to the new titles from Irish History Online and also to all the material in the Royal Historical Society and London's Past Online databases that has been identified as relating to Irish history, a total of nearly 33,000 titles. The same data can also be searched from a dedicated search menu.

Other news

In addition to the 14,000 titles from Irish History Online, we have added over 4200 other new titles. 834 of these new records are from London's Past Online; 1400 of the new records cover titles published in 2003-4.

The indexing of many existing titles has been improved.

Posted 31 August 2004 | back to the top

10 August 2004

Plans for launch of Irish History Online

It is planned that Writings on Irish History Online will become available in the latter part of August 2004. The first batch of data will cover the contents of Writings on Irish History for 1989 to 1998 and will be searchable from the Royal Historical Society search menu as well as from a dedicated search menu. We are delaying the next update of the Royal Historical Society data to coincide with the launch of Irish History Online.

Other news

As the database grows, some searches (especially searches by Subject classification and by Place index) have become very slow. We hope to find a technical solution to this problem, but, as an interim measure, we have placed a warning sign against some terms in the Subject classification and Place index browsable indexes which will produce large numbers of results and which we recommend should be used only in combined searches. We have also increased the number of results shown on each page of the brief display to 100 in order to minimize the delays that may occur when a second page of results is opened. We recommend that the Publication type search available on the Search builder should be used only to restrict the results of other searches; the browsable index for this field is now generated by a new method which should ensure that the index is generated more quickly.

We plan to improve our coverage of electronic journals. Electronic journals will be included if they meet at least three of the following criteria:

Editorial board includes well-known scholars in the field or demonstrates association with a university department;
Scholarly content;
Published regularly, or with reasonable frequency;

Submissions are refereed.
We welcome recommendations from users for journals that might be included.

Posted 10 August 2004 | back to the top

30 April 2004

Data upgrade

Nearly 6000 additional titles. This update is the first to include information on recent publications not previously included in the Society’s printed bibliographies (which ceased with the Annual Bibliography covering titles of 2002). The update contains some 2300 items published in 2003 and 2004 which, had the printed version been continued, would not have appeared in the bibliography until autumn 2004 or 2005. However, we appreciate that users of the printed Annual Bibliographies will miss the opportunity which the printed version gave to browse a list of newly published works in a particular field; for information on how the online version can be used in the same way, please see our page on browsing latest additions.

More 2003 and 2004 publications will appear in a further update in early summer 2004.

Some subject areas are better represented in this update than others, as a result of the different timetables to which the bibliography’s section editors work. This update does not include titles specific to Irish history, which are now being handled by the Writings on Irish History On-Line project. However, we expect that their data will become available online, with access through the RHS Bibliographies interface, in summer 2004.

Indexing of many existing titles upgraded.

Improved links to other online resources. We are gradually including links to journal websites, where these are available, and we are also introducing links to newly posted contributions to the Institute of Historical Research’s online Reviews in History.

We have replaced the abbreviations for county names used in the Place index with the full names of the counties. This will improve the results of searches for counties when these are carried out using Simple search, or using Subject (free text) on the Full search form. However, this does mean that, when you search for most county towns using Simple search or Subject (free text), the automatic truncation on these fields will increase the number of results relating to the county rather than to the town (e.g. searching for “Hertford” will produce results including records indexed with “Hertfordshire”). For more precise results, which should be comprehensive for titles published in 1993 and later, use the Place index field on the Full search form.

Posted 30 April 2004 | back to the top

20 December 2003

Data upgrade

Over 10,000 additional titles including the contents of the RHS Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History for 2002.

Indexing of many existing titles upgraded.

Project news

We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for a further grant from its Resource Enhancement programme to maintain and develop the online service for three years from 1 January 2004.

The RHS has decided to concentrate resources on the online bibliography and as a result the printed Annual Bibliography will no longer be produced. This will allow material to be published online more speedily and will also help us to share resources with other similar projects such as the new Writings on Irish History On-Line project.

As a result of the restructuring of the project, Dr Austin Gee, who has been General Editor of the Annual Bibliography since 1995, will be leaving. We would like to thank him for his enormous contribution to the RHS bibliographies over the past years. A new Assistant Project Editor, Simon Baker, will be joining us in January 2004.

Posted 20 December 2003 | back to the top

20 November 2003

RHS Bibliography collaboration with Writings on Irish History On-Line

We are pleased to announce that the Royal Historical Society Bibliography has embarked on an exciting new collaboration with Writings on Irish History On-Line.
Writings on Irish History On-Line is a project funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, based in the Department of Modern History, NUI Maynooth, under the supervision of Professor Jacqueline Hill.
It will henceforth form the Irish component of the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History, offering more comprehensive coverage of publications on Irish history. An editor (Dr Anthony McCormack) and a data-inputter (Ms Mary Murray) started work in October 2003, inputting data from past and current Writings on Irish History (published by Irish Historical Studies under the aegis of the Royal Irish Academy’s National Committee for History).
It is expected that the first batch of data, covering publications of 1993-6, will become available on-line by the summer of 2004.

3 July 2003

Simple search truncation

Default truncation feature added to the Simple Search to enable a greater range of results.

Suggestions for corrections or additions to the database

Feedback forms have been provided for users to suggest corrections and additions to books, book articles and journal articles.

Posted 3 July 2003 | back to the top

28 May 2003

Search and results screens redesigned. New features are listed below. You can click on the links for more help.

New Simple search option available from the opening Search menu provides quick and easy searching of the data by keyword. (The Search form and Search builder options previously available here are still provided: click on Full search; the Search builder is available as a link from here. Full search offers all the facilities of the former Search form in a new clearer format, except that you can no longer switch off right truncation in the fields where it is available; to use these fields without truncation, you must now use the Search builder.)

Simplified opening Search menu page for London's Past Online.

When you start from the Royal Historical Society opening Search menu, you can now search all records using all available fields on the Full search form and Search builder. The way in which the data have been indexed means that selecting some fields will still lead to earlier records being omitted from your search - you can click on the warning buttons next to the affected fields for more information.

When you start from the Royal Historical Society opening Search menu, the latest additions option no longer includes all records from London's Past Online - only records added to the Royal Historical Society data in and since January 2003, and records added to London's Past Online since January 2003, are included. A separate London material only option now enables you to search all material from London's Past Online together with all Royal Historical Society records that have been identified as relating to the Greater London area.

Revised data:

Over 1000 additional titles.

Indexing of many existing titles upgraded.

Posted 28 May 2003 | back to the top

January 2003

Data reloaded. Additional data include:

Some 8800 additional titles representing the contents of the Royal Historical Society Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History for 2001, containing titles published in 2001 and also titles published in the period 1993-2000 not previously included in the bibliography.

Data from the related London's Past Online project: over 28,000 additional titles relating to the history of the Greater London area. You can now also search for titles on London's history only (including the titles from London's Past Online) by going to a dedicated search menu.

Indexing of many existing titles upgraded.

New features:

New Close matches only feature for period covered searching.

New 'Events and periods' heading added to the Subject classification hierarchy.

Posted January 2003 | back to the top