Connected Histories: Sources for British History, 1500-1900

Launched on 1 April Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900 is a federated search engine to search in a single search a wide range of distributed digital resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British history.

The following 11 resources are included:

  • British History Online: The digital library of primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain, from the Middle Ages to c.1900.
  • British Museum Images: The collection provides searchable access to almost 100,000 images, relating to early modern and 19th-century Britain.
  • British Newspapers, 1600-1900: The most comprehensive digital historic British newspaper archive in existence, with 3 million pages of historic newspapers, newsbooks and ephemera from national and regional papers.  Oxford user? Check below for tip how to connect to British Newspapers from Connected Histories.
  • Charles Booth Online Archive: The online archive provides access to guides, digitised images and maps from the Booth archive collections at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of London Library.
  • Clergy of the Church of England Database 1540-1835: A database containing details of the careers of more than 130,000 clergymen of the Church of England between 1540 and 1835, from over 50 archives in England and Wales.
  • House of Commons Parliamentary Papers: The Parliamentary Papers gives access to page images and searchable full text for over 200,000 House of Commons sessional papers and supplementary information from 1688 onwards.
  • John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera: The collection provides access to more than 67,000 scanned items from the Bodleian Library’s holdings documenting various aspects of everyday life in Britain from the 18th to the early 20th century.
  • Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674-1913: The Old Bailey Online contains accounts of the trials conducted at London’s central criminal court between 1674 and 1913; and also the Ordinary’s Accounts – detailed narratives of the lives and deaths of convicts executed at Tyburn, published between 1676 and 1772.
  • London Lives 1600-1800: London Lives provides a fully searchable edition of 240,000 manuscript pages from eight London archives and 15 datasets, giving access to 3.5 million names.
  • Origins Network: Origins.net offers online access to some of the richest ancestral information available. The collection searchable through Connected Histories focuses on the early modern history of London.
  • John Strype’s Survey of London: This is a full-text electronic version of John Strype’s enormous two-volume survey of 1720, complete with its celebrated maps and plates, which depict the prominent buildings, street plans and ward boundaries of the late Stuart capital.

Oxford Users

Please note that some of the resources searched are free while others require subscriptions. Fortunately Oxford users have access to all resources with the single exception of Origins.net.

Connecting to Burney:

If you find results from British Newspapers, 1600-1900 (aka 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection), you will be prompted with the UserGroup Identification. Type in oxford to proceed.

Remote access to Oxford subscription resources works best if you use VPN.

Wellcome Unit Library: new website for history of medicine library in Oxford

The small specialist collections for History of Medicine in Oxford are housed in the Wellcome Unit Library.  It now has a new website with many features and news items.

It also has a number of tools to help users keep up-to-date with library news, latest book purchases, bookmarked resources, etc.

Blog – http://wellcomeunitlibrary.wordpress.com/

Twitter – http://twitter.com/WelLibOxford

LibraryThing (new books) – http://www.librarything.com/profile/WelLibOxford

Del.icio.us (bookmarked web resources)- http://www.delicious.com/HSMTOxford

Reviews in History: keep up-to-date with choice of RSS feeds

Launched in 1996, Reviews in History publishes reviews and reappraisals of significant work in all fields of historical interest.  The ejournals includes over 1000 reviews to date and new reviews appear regularly. You can browse reviews by type of review (digital reviews, textbooks, articles, books, etc.) or by subject, period or country.

The journal’s key features are:

* Reviews of greater length than usually found in scholarly journals (2000–3000 words)
* Free access to reviews, with free email alert with links to the latest reviews.
* Texts available to print in convenient format
* Speed of publication
* Right of reply for authors and editors
* Reviews undertaken by leading scholars
* Broad scope – chronologically, geographically and thematically
* Valuable as a resource for research, teaching and studying history at undergraduate and graduate levels

To help you keep-up-date with new reviews, the ejournal now also offers a great choice of RSS feeds: this week’s review, digital reviews, and feeds by subject, period and country. Take your pick and don’t miss a trick!

Finding what you really need on SOLO: Tips and Tools

Finding what you really need on SOLO: Tips and Tools

Wednesday 23 February (week 6), 14:00-15:00 – Book here

If you feel like you’re just not getting the best out of SOLO then come along to this session which will help you explore some of its more advanced functionality for searching and managing results.

Presenter: S. McLean

Location: IT Room, History Faculty, George Street

RefWorks for Humanities

RefWorks is an online tool which allows you to manage your references, insert them into your work, automatically generate bibliographies and easily switch between citation styles. This introduction is open to all, but the section on importing references will focus on Humanities examples.

Presenters: Kate Petherbridge and Shona McLean

Wednesday 12 May, 14:00-17:00, OUCS  |  Book Here

RefWorks: History Faculty Style updates

The History Faculty Style in RefWorks has been updated today. There are now two versions of the style:  ‘History Faculty, Oxford – Notes & bib. (beta)’ and ‘History Faculty, Oxford – Bibliography only (beta)’. The first version is the one you will need to format your footnotes and create a bibliography at the same time using Write-N-Cite. The second version of the style is the one that allows you to create a stand-alone bibliography from a list of references in RefWorks.

N.B. If the History Faculty style was saved as one of your favourites in RefWorks you will now need to resave both versions as it will have been lost from your list during the update.

We have also updated the style to solve the problem of edited works appearing out of sequence at the top of bibliographies. Please note you will need to check your references to make sure the Reference Type is ‘Book, Edited’ and that the editors are in the ‘Editors’ field rather than the ‘Series Editors’ field.

RefWorks: History Faculty Style updated

The History Faculty Style in RefWorks has been updated today. It now allows you to create both your citations and bibliography at the same time using Write-N-Cite instead of having to create a separate stand-alone bibliography.

Important: please remember to only put your citations in footnotes with this style as it does not support in-text citations.

If the History Faculty style was saved as one of your favourites in RefWorks you will now need to resave it as it will have been lost from your list during the update.

There will be a RefWorks Introduction training session for History graduates and researchers: Wednesday 10th March, 15:00-16:00, Computing Room, History Faculty, George Street. To book a place click here.