The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM is a comprehensive database of references to literature on the history of Britain, Ireland, and the British abroad. The database includes approximately 250,000 records detailing most of the books and articles on these subjects published between 1901 and 1992, and many from before then. The bibliography covers Britain and Ireland during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the 1980s.
The CD-ROM allows you to search by author or title of work, by subject, by date of publication, or by period of interest to find references to sources including not only books, but also articles in journals, and articles in books (such as conference proceedings and festschriften). Different kinds of enquiry can be used together in a single search, and searches can be saved and combined to carry out complex queries and find extremely specific information.
Full search facilities are available for publications since 1945 (and some earlier publications, particularly those on Imperial and Commonwealth history). Bibliographical information about earlier publications can be searched at the same time as more recent material - an extremely usesful function for those seeking material on specific individuals or places.
Search for Authors You can search for works by a particular author across the entire database. For example, searching for Eric Hobsbawn, will return 45 records. Roy Porter 56, or K.B. McFarlane 21. Searches by author can be combined with other searches to find what an author has written about a particular subject area, or what an author wrote in a particular period. You can answer queries such as: When did Stubbs last publish on British history? What did Geoffrey Elton write on post-Tudor history?
Search for historical figures These searches will locate not only biographies, but other works with significant material on specific people and their influence. For example, you could search for major intellectual figures from Bede, to Adam Smith, to John Maynard Keynes; major political figures from Simon de Montfort, to Oliver Cromwell, to Margaret Thatcher; or scientists and engineers such as Isaac Newton, or Isambard Kingdom Brunel. You can also find the most obscure people - if anything has been written about them - such as Herbert the Jerkin Maker, an eleventh-century Cheshire under-tenant.
Search by geography Works on constituent parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Channel Islands, Isle of Man) can be identified; you can include them or exclude them from a search, or search for one or more of these areas.
The database also provides the first comprehensive bibliographic survey of the history of Britain's relations with the Empire and Commonwealth.
Over 35,000 titles relating to these subjects are included and can be searched in conjunction with those on British and Irish history so that the interaction between domestic and imperial history can be understood.
Imperial and Commonwealth titles can also be searched separately, and the majority of them are classified into some 20 geographical regions.
Many local history items are indexed by county - searching by county name will include items on smaller places within the county as well as items dealing with the county as a whole. Searching on Wiltshire, for instance, will return 985 results, or Montgomeryshire 329 results. More particular places (both large and small) such as Birmingham, Cork or Auchtermuchty can be found by using the free-text search.
Search by period covered All publications since 1945 (and some earlier ones) have been given an indication of the period covered, to the nearest quarter century. This makes it possible to search for as broad or narrow a period as is desired (to the nearest quarter century), and include within the search all relevant works, irrespective of what other periods they cover. So, for example, a search for the period 1625-49 will include general works that cover that period.
Facilities are also provided to exclude items covering very long periods if you wish to do so.
Search by date of publication This enables you to confine a search to recent works in order to discover recent interpretations. It is also possible to search for works published during a period of historical interest.
The bibliography covers Britain and Ireland during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the 1980s. Search by subject Post-1945 publications (and some earlier ones) are allocated to one or more of the following thematic areas: general; population and environment; social structure and organization; family, household, and social conduct; economic activity and organization; science, technology, and medicine; ideas and learning; the arts; religion and belief; constitutional, administrative, and legal history; politics and political culture; military history; overseas affairs; women's history. The women's history filter allows titles on any subject area to be filtered for material on women's history.
In addition, information about more specific subjects can be found by searching titles and (for post-1945 publications) added subject descriptors.
These searches will often be most effective in combination with thematic or period filters. For example, searching for railways across the entire database will give 1997 results and railways in Wiltshire 16. Again, these searches could be restricted by time period, to give for example, material on railways in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, or on Wiltshire railways in the period 1900-1949. Other features Wildcard search preview For wildcard searches, each match of the wildcard will be displayed for acceptance. This will help you to eliminate the unwanted groups of wildcard matches. For example, if a general (that is, in all searchable fields) search is performed for Jew**, you will be presented with the matching patterns as they are found, including for example Jew, Jews, Jewish, and Jewson, and will be able to reject the irrelevant ones, in this case possibly Jewson. This feature is optional and can be switched on and off as required.
Search results You can review the list of search results in order to exclude unwanted records before saving the list. There are two ways of saving search results: autosave: the last set of search results and the search criteria are saved automatically manual save:you can choose which search results and/or criteria to save The results saved in either way can then be reloaded into the application and combined.
Export You can export data in either comma delimited or standard display formats. The comma delimited format allows you to import data in specialized bibliographical programmes such as Pro-Cite, or into commonly used databases such as MS Access Printing You can print out the current record or all records for any author in the database, for any search you have made, or for any records you have bookmarked.
Thesaurus A thesaurus of terms used within the database as keywords (descriptors) is provided as part of the help system. Words are presented in both alphabetical and hierarchical display and you can paste the terms from the thesaurus into text searching boxes in the search screen.
List of places A list of Commonwealth and Imperial places is included in the help text. This shows how different countries and places are assigned to each area displayed in the Imperial, Colonial, and Commonwealth search box.
List of journals This comprises a list of up to 5,000 journals from which the database has been sourced.
Bookmarks You can bookmark records as you browse through the authors list or the search results list. Bookmarked records will be saved to a file which can be recalled into the product or other applications. The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM: the history of Britain, Ireland, and the British Overseas enables you to locate and compile bibliographic references quickly and easily. It is ideal for academics and amateur historians and should be a core part of every history library collection.
