The Royal Historical Society Bibliography

Annual Bibliographies
The Royal Historical Society (RHS) has been involved with the production of Bibliographies of British and Irish history for over seventy years, working for much of this time in conjunction with the Institute of Historical Research. For a full account of the RHS's role in this area, see the article by Ian Archer on the Institute's Making History website.

From 1975 to 2002 the RHS produced, in conjunction with the Institute, Annual Bibliographies of publications relating to the history of the British Isles, and of the British empire and commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present. Each volume appeared within ten months of the close of the calendar year whose publications it covers.

As well as aiming to provide a comprehensive list of books published in the field, the Annuals list articles in collective volumes such as conference proceedings and festschriften, and involved a survey of some 700 journals for relevant periodical literature. The 2002 Annual contains 11,238 titles, including 7150 articles.

Material is broken down into period divisions, and subdivided thematically using a categorisation scheme devised for the project. Each period division was the responsibility of an appropriate scholar. The Annuals contain indexes of authors and of subjects (the latter including in the more recent volumes separate indexes of personal names and of places). For details of individual volumes, and ordering information, click here.

The RHS decided in 2003 to cease publication of the printed Annuals in order to concentrate resources on the online edition. This has allowed material to be published online more speedily and has also helped us to share resources with other similar projects such as Writings on Irish History Online. However, a team of scholars continues to review the new material added to the online database so as to ensure that the bibliography continues to serve historians' needs.

Cumulative CD-ROM
In 1998 Oxford University Press published the first version of the Royal Historical Society's electronic database, The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM: The History of Britain, Ireland, and the British Overseas. It consolidates over 50 existing bibliographies (including the Annual Bibliographies for 1975-92) and adds to them a number of additional index points to create a database of approximately 250,000 records detailing most of the books and articles on these subjects published between 1901 and 1992, and many from before then. Searches can be carried out on a number of criteria and different kinds of enquiry can be combined in a single search. For further details and ordering information, click here.

Online Edition
Following the project's move to the Institute of Historical Research, a new online edition of the database was published in July 2002, and is being updated regularly. It now contains over 460,000 titles. It incorporates not only the contents of the CD-ROM, but also those of the Annual Bibliographies for 1993-2002, as well as subsequent updates (for more information, see our news page). In addition to the printed material included in the Annual Bibliographies we are now also including some electronic journals (for a full list of journals searched click here), and we are providing links to online full text of print publications and to online reviews where available. The online edition also includes some earlier publications not included in the printed and CD-ROM editions.

Online publication has facilitated cooperation with other projects. Records from London's Past Online, a bibliography of the history of the London area, were added at the start of 2003 - London's Past Online now gives access to over 43,000 records. Data compiled by London's Past Online can be searched seamlessly with the RHS data, and is included when you choose the all records option on the RHS bibliography Search menu; by selecting the London material only option on the RHS bibliography Search menu you can search data compiled by London's Past Online together with RHS data relating to Greater London, or you can search the same data through a dedicated search menu. You can visit London's Past Online's own website for more information.

From October 2003, the RHS bibliography also began to cooperate closely with Irish History Online, which will henceforth form the Irish component of the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History, offering more comprehensive coverage of publications on Irish history. As with London's Past Online, data compiled by Irish History Online can be searched seamlessly with the RHS data, and is included when you choose the all records option on the RHS bibliography Search menu; by selecting the Irish material only option on the main RHS bibliography Search menu you can search data compiled by Irish History Online together with RHS data relating to Ireland, or you can search the same data through a dedicated search menu. You can visit Irish History Online's own website for more information.

Since late 2006 the bibliography has worked with teams operating under the auspices of the Scottish Historical Review Trust which have taken over the editing of the primarily Scottish titles contained in the bibliography, and which generate some of the new titles on Scottish history. Initially this work was carried out at Stirling University, but it was taken over by a team at St Andrews University in November 2008. This co-operation with the Scottish Historical Review Trust is enhancing the coverage of Scottish history in the bibliography, as well as providing a richer, more user-friendly and more frequently updated bibliography of Scottish history than that previously available in the Scottish Historical Review's printed lists of new articles. Data compiled by the Scottish Historical Review Trust can be searched seamlessly with the RHS data, and is included when you choose the all records option on the RHS bibliography Search menu; by selecting the Scottish material only option on the main RHS bibliography Search menu you can search data compiled by the Scottish Historical Review Trust together with RHS data relating to Scotland.

A major aim of the online edition is to improve the effectiveness and consistency with which data can be searched, and for this purpose a comprehensive hierarchical scheme of subject-indexing terms has been prepared. This scheme is based on the thematic structure that was used in the Annual Bibliographies; it has been used for indexing all publications of 1993 and later, and is now being applied to earlier publications.

[top of page]