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In response to libraries and archives being closed in 2020 the IHR launched this page to steer researchers to freely accessible online research resources. Below you will find lists of links to these resources, organised, for example, by publication type, chronology and theme. At the start you will also find helpful advice from the IHR Library team on how to make the most of this resource.
This webpage contains a selection of curated links to online research resources that can be used for historical research of all kinds. From digitised archives to oral histories, newspapers, maps and printed collections, we hope that there will some material that can help with your work or with supporting your students.
We have organised the material by period. This is always something of an arbitrary exercise, and there will be some duplication. Some key subject or perhaps unexpected formats have also been included, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality (why not, for example, visit relevant historical sites around the world via Google Streetview?).
This is of course simply a small selection of the vast amount of material that is out there. You will know more about what is available in your own area of specialism, and Google, DuckDuckGo or Ecosia will uncover more. There are also numerous online guides and bibliographies, both general and specialised, that will give further suggestions, these include Wikipedia's list of digitised newspapers. Your library will also be able to advise on what is available for you behind paywalls.
Some of the material has been selected by IHR librarians and colleagues in the institute, while others have been suggested by others. We are pleased to hear about suggestions, either by emailing ihr.l...@sas.ac.uk or through a short online suggestions box. The full spreadsheet of suggestions might also be useful to review and search.
Like all sources, online materials have their own history and pose challenges and questions for historians and other researchers. How were they collected? Why were they selected? Where did they come from? Who pays for it? What's been left out? What are the differences between the physical records and their online representation? What shortcuts sneak into our methods that may undermine the rigour of our overall argument?
Understanding how archives are created and arranged is an essential part of historical research, and there are similar considerations for their online equivalent. How are archival hierarchies, indexes or catalogues created online? Are they automated, do they use international standards, or their own bespoke thesaurus of terms? Technical understanding of scribal methods, forms of writing, and the purpose for which records were created are important things to understand, an awareness of digital technologies, from the limits of scanning technology to OCR and XML, can be useful, too. Many online archives have also been created from microforms, and digital archives, particularly web archives, may have been migrated from one format to another, losing data or functionality along the way.
Archives also have a range of definitions, with archivists conceptualising them as the materials produced by an individual, family or organisation during the course of their life or work, and archives seen in more general terms as collections of old records. Online 'archives' may also be synthetic creations, gathering both primary and secondary materials together in new ways, perhaps with an attention to rediscover hidden voices. Again, historians will be alert to how this shapes our understanding of the past. For this list, we will be as expansive as possible.
Finally, there are matters of scale and quantity. Your materials may be too vast, or too limited; but what are the opportunities opened up by this? Is close reading of one or two documents as useful as reading thousands of items? What are the opportunities opened up by analysing texts or images at scale, perhaps by using the tools of the digital humanities?
Blaney, Jonathan and Judith Seifring, 'A Culture of non-citation: Assessing the digital impact of British History Online and the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership', Digital History Quarterly (2017).
Putnam, Lara, 'The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast' (working paper) published as 'The Transnational and the Text-Searchable: Digitized Sources and the Shadows They Cast', American Historical Review 121 (2016).
You will be familiar with the eBooks and other resources made available by your own institution's library. There will be guides to these on the library website, perhaps along with a special guide prepared for the current situation.
Many eBook and online journal providers are extending the amount of materials available at this time, so if you have not found what you needed in the past, it may be worth checking now. Your librarian many need to arrange a trial or access. Jisc has coordinated a list of suppliers now offering extended access.
Some libraries, such as the Bodleian History Faculty Library, have provided useful guides and lists of tips for locating open access and other online texts, such as making use of the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library.
Below is listed a number of online databases of PhD theses where in many instances you can also download an electronic copy. It is also worth searching general online electronic libraries such as Jisc Library Hub , Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog and Rian : Pathways to Irish Research as well as library catalogues and databases of individual universities.
The European portal for finding electronic theses and dissertations. DART-Europe is a partnership of research libraries and library consortia who are working together to improve global access to European research theses.
The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) is an international organization dedicated to promoting the adoption, creation, use, dissemination, and preservation of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). We support electronic publishing and open access to scholarship in order to enhance the sharing of knowledge worldwide. Our website includes resources for university administrators, librarians, faculty, students, and the general public. Topics include how to find, create, and preserve ETDs; how to set up an ETD program; legal and technical questions; and the latest news and research in the ETD community.
Theses Canada, launched in 1965 at the request of the deans of Canadian graduate schools, is a collaborative program between Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and Canadian universities. It strives acquire and preserve theses and dissertations from participating universities, provide free access to Canadian digital theses and dissertations in the collection and facilitate access to non-digital theses and dissertations in the collection.
A service similar to the UK's Ethos service. You can search the database for French completed French doctoral theses and those in preparation and access an online version for those records marked with an "Accder en ligne" tab.
The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) lists over 480,000 items published between 1473 and 1800 published mainly in the British Isles and North America from the collections of the British Library and over 2,000 other libraries.
Welcome to Library Hub Discover, giving you access to details of materials held in many UK national, academic and specialist libraries. Library Hub Discover currently contains 45,647,877 records created from 118,128,539 records contributed by 158 institutions.
This digital collection offers full-text access to more than 1200 publications on Aceh, the province located at the northern end of the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. The books form part of the collection of the Royal Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden which is kept at the Leiden University Library. The titles date from the 17th till the turn of the 21th century and are in a variety of languages such as Indonesian, Acehnese, English and Dutch. Due to copyright issues titles published after 1900 can only be accessed from desktop computers situated in the University Library.
Site created and curated by the Black Central European Studies Network (BCESN) providing access to a number of document and picture collections highlighting the history of the Black diaspora in Central Europe from 1000 to the present day.
The Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts makes images of over 12,000 texts from throughout Laos easily accessible for study. There is a wide diversity in the manuscript collection, covering a large geographical area and historical timeframe, different literary traditions and schools of scribes, and different languages and scripts. The majority of the texts are from the Lao, Lan Na and Tai Lue traditions, with smaller numbers in Tai Nuea, and Tai Dam, etc.
The Digital Corpus assembles a wide range of Greek texts and their Arabic counterparts. It also includes a number of Arabic commentaries and important secondary sources. The texts in the corpus can be consulted individually or side by side with their translation.
Created by Fordham University, this website introduces resources available for research about medieval London and its people, focusing not only on documentary and narrative sources in print, but also archaeological, visual, and cartographic sources that illuminate the physical and material world inhabited by medieval Londoners. An important component of the website is the Medieval Londoners Database (MLD), which records the activities of London residents between c. 1100 and 1520, and is searchable by name, gender, citizenship status, location (ward, parish, and street if available), craft, occupation, civic office, and craft office, among other variables.
Digital copy of the relevant extracts taken from, Henry R. Percival, ed. The Seven EcumenicalCouncils of the Undivided Church, Vol XIV of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, (reprinted Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids MI: Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1988)
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