By Sophie Young, Classification Officer: syoung@ihr.sas.ac.uk

Please immediately note that our new Internet address is now http://www.ihrinfo.ac.uk/

HISTORY is continuing to develop rapidly on four fronts: the interdisciplinary, the international, the commercial and the cross-cultural:

1. The prospect of there being a national service composed of a number of faculty-based gateways led to HISTORY calling a meeting of those interested in the subjects on the Internet which HESA defines as the humanities: history, archaeology, theology, philosophy and the history of art. It was a stimulating meeting and the second is soon to be held. Theories associated with interdisciplinarity have developed little over the last thirty years, as a recent day conference organised by ALSIS demonstrated but it is an increasingly important reality in Higher Education which HISTORY is addressing.

2. HISTORY has always been closely concerned with the international aspect of its work and a multi-million ECU bid was made to the EU last year for HISTORY-EU but fell at the second post. This work is progressing, however, with the help of enthusiastic volunteers in East and West Europe. HISTORY also plans to establish mirror sites in France, Germany and Italy by the summer. One project with which HISTORY is involved is interdisciplinary and international, involving historians, architects, civil engineers and others in France, Italy and the U.K. The result will be made available in electronic form. The service is also extending the British History in Germany database, which is currently available online in browsable format, into a fully searchable facility. This is being made possible through the use of ROADS software and the assistance of the ROADS technicians, Jon and Martin. To date, approximately 1400 records have been slurped, indexed and we are now working through the teething problems.

3. The commercial world looks for support and information from the Higher Education sector which is years ahead [thanks mainly to JISC funding] and HISTORY is in the final stages of negotiation with major U.K. publishers to provide a joint comprehensive service which will involve most U.K. publishers.

4. Information made available by Higher Education on history must be friendly and accessible to all interested. Indeed, services should be market makers and chase up possible users. HISTORY has received some funding from Further Education to identify historians in that sector, it is also closely associated with the Historical Association, http://history.org.uk/, as well as being connected with the new BUILDER project, http://builder.bham.ac.uk/builderHome/ which has taken history as one of its subjects, where the largest public library in Europe is involved [Birmingham].

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