Irish History Online: future plans

Like the RHS Bibliography, Irish History Online will be changing its publication arrangements in the new year, but will remain a free service at http://www.irishhistoryonline.ie/. More information is available on Irish History Online's website.

Update to Bibliography of British and Irish History

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: for details see the RHS Bibliography news page.

IHR Director Miles Taylor on the Today Programme

The IHR's Director, Professor Miles Taylor, can be heard on this morning's (18 December) Today Programme discussing the new History of Parliament volumes on the House of Commons between 1820 and 1832. He and the HoP's Philip Salmon were both asked as to whether any parallels could be drawn between the problems of this period and the expenses-related travails of today's Parliament. Click here and scroll down to 8.53 to listen to the interview.

New Resource on the Grand Tour

The Grand Tour, the 18th-century aristocratic rite of passage retraced earlier this year for Channel 4 by Kevin McCloud, is the focus of a new digital resource.

Produced by Adam Matthew Digital, The Grand Tour collates letters, diaries, printed guidebooks, travel writing, maps, paintings and architectural plans within one searchable, online website, and is reviewed here by Katy Layton-Jones of the University of Leicester.

Complete Series of Voluntary Action History Seminar Podcasts

The whole of the autumn term series of the Voluntary Action History seminar is now available to listen to in podcast form. The last seminar of the year, Other Times, Other Places: Parallels from Historical Research and International Practice, was held jointly with the Institute for Volunteering Research. Click here to listen to both papers.

Medieval History Reviews

Reviews in History has been accused with some justification in the past of concentrating too heavily on books of recent history. We’re making every effort to correct this imbalance, and as evidence of this two medieval history reviews have been published this week.

First Miriam Müller and Chris Briggs discuss (no. 835 and response) the latter’s Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth Century England, while elsewhere a book of comparative religious and cultural history, A Tale of Two Monasteries: Westminster and Saint-Denis in the Thirteenth Century by William Chester Jordan, is reviewed (no. 836) by Andrew Abram.

However, we'd still be really keen to receive any suggestions of forthcoming books on medieval history that we should cover, and particularly any relevant electronic resources in this area. All suggestions to danny.millum@sas.ac.uk.

British History Online Easier to Annotate

We have recently introduced a big improvement to the way our annotation feature for British History Online works, enhancing the experience for both annotators and readers. You will need to be logged in, but now simply double clicking on a line of text brings up the annotation pane. The most important feature of the enhancement is that the tool recognises the part of the text that you double clicked, so that when the annotation is published there is a hyperlink to it at the appropriate point. Readers browsing through BHO will now start to see hyperlinks in texts where readers have annotated, so that they can easily see what has been commented upon. Not all of the texts on BHO can be annotated, but hundreds can and we are planning to extend the feature more widely across the site. If you're not sure if a page can be annotated, the way to tell is that the green citation box at the top will have a link that says "Comment on this article" as in this example.

Remember that when you add annotations these will all be saved for you in the 'View Your Annotations' page of 'My Account'.