WELCOME TO IRISH HISTORY ONLINE

Friday, October 30, 2009

Irish History Online is an authoritative guide (in progress) to what has been written about Irish history from earliest times to the present. It was established in association with the Royal Historical Society Bibliography of British and Irish History (of which it is now the Irish component) and London's Past Online.

Since the most recent update (December 2008) IHO contains some 66,000 items, drawn mostly from Writings on Irish History, and covering publications from 1936 to 2005 (in progress). It is planned to add records for 2006 and 2007 during 2009. In addition, IHO contains all the Irish material currently held on the online Royal Historical Society Bibliography. (The latter is less comprehensive but covers a longer period of publications, up to the most recent.) During the current phase of funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006-9), particular attention is being paid to enhancing coverage of the Irish abroad: during 2008 over 500 new records on the Irish abroad have been added, including many references collected in libraries in the U.S.A. and Canada.

Irish History Online includes articles from journals, both national and local history journals, and collective volumes. Searches can be made by author, by subject, by publication details, or by period covered. It is an essential resource for the study of Irish history at any level, and is free of charge to users.

Searching takes the same form as the RHS Bibliography. Users may search via 'Simple search' or 'Full search', and Help menus are the same. Thanks to the connection with the RHS Bibliography, users of Irish History Online may take advantage of links from certain records to other electronic resources, including COPAC (which indicates the location in British and Irish libraries of particular works); World Cat; the Oxford DNB (if the PC is networked to a library with a subscription to the DNB); and full text versions of some articles through EDINA's Get Copy service.

The RHS Bibliography itself may be reached via:

http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl

We welcome your comments about IHO.

Irish History Online is funded under the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences Government of Ireland Project Grants scheme.