Budding historians are set to benefit from a new online project which will revolutionise the way we search for historical sources on the internet, thanks to a £198,977 cash boost from JISC.
The ‘Connected Histories’ project, which is a partnership between the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research, and King’s College London, will create an innovative search engine for a wide range of electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth century British history.
This period of British history has one of the largest collections of digital sources available on the web, including not only digitised books, but also newspapers, manuscripts, genealogical records, and even maps and images. These sources, created by both academic and commercial organisations, are accessed by hundreds of thousands of individuals every day, across the world. Until now, there has been no single starting place to search through these sources.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager for online content at JISC, said: "JISC has been involved in the digitisation of many crucial primary resources for the study of history, helping create a wealth of digitised materials, such as newspapers, pamphlets and images. The next stage of work is to knit such resources together - identifying the people, places and events that surface in multiple historical resources and making the links between them."
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The website will be fully launched in 2011.
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