Compact History
Ian Fitzgerald examines the benefits of accessing British History now available on CD-ROM.
From time immemorial the cruel sea of books, bibliographies, and indices of the great libraries has often drowned the historical researcher in his humble quest for knowledge, but now thanks to the compact disc, help is at hand.
The Royal Historical Society British Bibliographies project has just reached the half-way stage in its unique scheme to compile a bibliography of 250,000 British and Irish history titles on one computerised database. Started in 1990 it will be available in CD-ROM format by 1997, with all the data held, amazingly, on just one compact disc.
It contains history books, periodicals and magazines – History Today included – covering British and Irish affairs, including Commonwealth and Imperial history, and less obvious byways such as archaeology.
Entries from over a hundred scholars worldwide have flooded the project's base in Cambridge. The technological basis of the project makes it the most advanced bibliography of its kind and its editor, seventeenth-century historian, Dr John Morrill of Selwyn College, Cambridge, claims 'this is going to put British history ahead of anywhere else in the world'.
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