Oxford University Press The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM: The History of Britain, Ireland, and the British Overseas: Windows Individual User Version (The ... Britain, Ireland, and the British Overseas)

The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM is a comprehensive database of references to literature on the history of Britain, Ireland, and the British abroad. The database includes approximately 250,000 records detailing most of the books and articles on these subjects published between 1901 and 1992, and many from before then. The bibliography covers Britain and Ireland during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the 1980s. The CD-ROM allows you to search by author or title of work, by subject, by date of publication, or by period of interest to find references to sources including not only books, but also articles in journals, and articles in books (such as conference proceedings and festschriften). Different kinds of enquiry can be used together in a single search, and searches can be saved and combined to carry out complex queries and find extremely specific information. Full search facilities are available for publications since 1945 (and some earlier publications, particularly those on Imperial and Commonwealth history). Bibliographical information about earlier publications can be searched at the same time as more recent material - an extremely usesful function for those seeking material on specific individuals or places. Search for Authors You can search for works by a particular author across the entire database. For example, searching for Eric Hobsbawn, will return 45 records. Roy Porter 56, or K.B. McFarlane 21. Searches by author can be combined with other searches to find what an author has written about a particular subject area, or what an author wrote in a particular period. You can answer queries such as: When did Stubbs last publish on British history? What did Geoffrey Elton write on post-Tudor history? Search for historical figures These searches will locate not only biographies, but other works with significant material on specific people and their influence. For example, you could search for major intellectual figures from Bede, to Adam Smith, to John Maynard Keynes; major political figures from Simon de Montfort, to Oliver Cromwell, to Margaret Thatcher; or scientists and engineers such as Isaac Newton, or Isambard Kingdom Brunel. You can also find the most obscure people - if anything has been written about them - such as Herbert the Jerkin Maker, an eleventh-century Cheshire under-tenant. Search by geography Works on constituent parts of the United Kingdom and Ireland (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Channel Islands, Isle of Man) can be identified; you can include them or exclude them from a search, or search for one or more of these areas. The database also provides the first comprehensive bibliographic survey of the history of Britain's relations with the Empire and Commonwealth. Over 35,000 titles relating to these subjects are included and can be searched in conjunction with those on British and Irish history so that the interaction between domestic and imperial history can be understood. Imperial and Commonwealth titles can also be searched separately, and the majority of them are classified into some 20 geographical regions. Many local history items are indexed by county - searching by county name will include items on smaller places within the county as well as items dealing with the county as a whole. Searching on Wiltshire, for instance, will return 985 results, or Montgomeryshire 329 results. More particular places (both large and small) such as Birmingham, Cork or Auchtermuchty can be found by using the free-text search. Search by period covered All publications since 1945 (and some earlier ones) have been given an indication of the period covered, to the nearest quarter century. This makes it possible to search for as broad or narrow a period as is desired (to the nearest quarter century), and include within the search all relevant works, irrespective of what other periods they cover. So, for example, a search for the period 1625-4