A GUIDE TO USING HISTORICAL RESOURCES ON THE INTERNET

CONTENTS

Determining A Site's Trustworthiness
Finding Electronic Journals on the Net
Primary Source Materials on the Net
Finding Primary Source Material on the Web
Finding General Historical Sites on the Web
Citing Web-based Material

NOTE
This site is created primarily for the use of members of the University of York. Some links will only work if accessed though a PC networked to the University of York system.

Determining A Site's Trustworthiness

There is an enormous, ever growing, and ever changing volume of websites and webpages of a historical nature. These may loosely be divided under four heads:

  • General 'historical' sites
  • Educational sites (may contain lecture outlines, bibliographies, course outlines etc.)
  • Electronic historical journals and scholarly articles
  • Sites that archive editions of primary source materials

Obviously not all sites fit readily under any one head and some combine more than one function. It is, nevertheless, important in evaluating the usefulness of any site to get some sense of what sort of site it is. In particular, it is necessary to get some sense of provenance -- where the site is hosted -- and authorship.

The first clue is in the web address (URL = uniform resource location). Academic sites hosted by universities and higher educational institutes will frequently contain ac. or edu. within the main part of the address, e.g. http://www.york.ac.uk/ or http://www.anu.edu.au/. There are, however, a number of countries which use different designators for universities (e.g. univ- in France) or none at all. The final letters of the main part of the address (uk, au in the examples just cited) indicate the country of origin. American institutions (like British postage stamps) do not have any indication of country, e.g. http://www.uillinois.edu/.

Sites posted by governmental organisations (both local and national) often use the designator gov. These include archive offices and government departments. These sometimes post collections of primary source material or pages that include primary source materials, e.g.  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award97/ncuhtml/fpnashome.html


The designator org. embraces variously semi-official or governmental bodies, societies and more commercial bodies.

Sites posted by private individuals or commercial organizations will invariably be hosted by a commercial internet provider, e.g. http://www.geocities.com/ or http://www.treko.net.au/, the designators com. and net. usually being indicative of such providers. (The designator org. embraces variously semi-official or governmental bodies, societies and more commercial bodies.)

Anyone can publish on the internet. Be particularly wary of information posted by private individuals.
Do not assume that material on the web reflects up to date scholarship or that because material is attractively presented that it is a useful supplement, let alone a substitute for more conventional publications.

The second clue is provided by indication, or non indication, of authorship. A couple of examples will illustrate the point.

Example 1.
'Forced Labour, Workhouse-Prisons And The Early Modern State: A Case Study' is hosted by the Institute of Historical Research (University of London) website in their 'electronic seminars in history' series. The specific URL is:
http://www.history.ac.uk/eseminars/sem6.html
The author is clearly identified as 'Dr Thomas Munck (University of Glasgow)'. Thus both the host site can be identified as an internationally recognised academic institution and similarly the author is an established academic at a like institution. By searching for Dr Munck using Google (http://www.google.co.uk) his institutional status and something of his publishing record in this area can quickly be established. It follows that the information contained here can be regarded as scholarly and may be treated in the same way as an article contained in a conventional academic periodical or essay collection.

Example 2.
'The Dreyfus Affair' is an article that forms part of larger site on Russian Jewry hosted by a Dutch organisation with backing from the Dutch foreign ministry and church organisations. The URL is:
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/beyond-the-pale/english/25.html
The text for the whole site is credited to Joke Kniesmeyer and Daniel Cil Brecher. The text is likely to be factually sound, but should not be regarded as a substitute for more substantial and scholarly writings on the same subject.

Example 3.
'Medieval England - daily life in medieval towns' is a commercial tourism-related website whose URL is:
http://www.britainexpress.com/History/Townlife.htm
There is no clear indication of authorship, though the page ends with the notice that 'contents © 2001 David Ross and Britain Express'. It follows that the information contained here should not be regarded as scholarly and hence should be distrusted as a source of information for academic purposes.

For sites offering secondary or interpretative material, knowledge of provenance and authorship may not be sufficient evidence by which to determine the scholarly value of a site. There is in fact a great deal of rather general lecture outline material generated particularly out of American colleges which is intended to be no more than an introduction to first year students taking broad survey courses. It may, therefore, be of very limited value to York undergraduates whose courses, even at first year level, are often more specialised. Once again there are certain things to look for and this again is best illustrated by some specific examples.

Example 4.
'Guilds and Commerce' can be shown from its URL* -- http://mars.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/wc1/lectures/24guilds.html -- to be part of a series of lectures. The page ends with an invitation to 'send comments and suggestions to: Professor Gerhard Rempel, at Western New England College', so Prof. Rempel is implicitly the author. This then is a page hosted by an academic institution and authored by a college professor. The unwary user might thus regard this as useful and academically sound without due regard for the context in which it was produced. Again using Google, it can readily be discovered that Western New England College is a small, private, liberal arts college and that Prof. Rempel is no longer a faculty member. The title 'professor', moreover, is the normal title for faculty in American colleges and universities and does not of itself imply particular academic distinction. Investigation of some of the other lectures posted by Prof. Rempel shows that he lectured on a wide range of historical topics from Antiquity to the seventeenth century. His lectures rarely provide any bibliographical indication -- and what there is tends to be very general -- and are written in terms of broad generalities without very much in the way of specific illustration or dates. This was no doubt appropriate for the needs of the college students for whom this and the related pages were created, but is too basic and general to be trusted by York history students.

* This original site ceased to operate before 2007, so the original URL given here is now incorporated within the archival URL.

Example 5.
'Arch 343: Cities in History: Lecture 9: Medieval Cities, Bruges and Florence' (URL: http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~arch343/lecture9.html) can likewise be identified as part of a lecture series. The lecture is specifically attributed to Dr. Richard Ingersoll, Rice University and is hosted on the official Rice University website. Clearly this is a more specialist lecture than example 4 and Dr Ingersoll has appended a list of secondary sources at the end of the lecture. This is, however, a lecture towards a course labelled, in the standard North American manner, as 'Arch 343'. The first digit (3--) indicates the level of the course, where (1--) is first-year level, (2--) seond-year, and (3--) is third-year. The 'Arch', however, warns that this is not a History course, which would be 'Hist', but an architecture course, as would be expected from the observation that Dr Ingersoll is an associate professor of architecture. This is reflected in the focus of the lecture. It should finally be noted that Dr Ingersoll's bibliography is mostly composed of general items.

The quality of bibliographical or reference material associated with any article, paper or lecture published on the web is in general a good clue to the scholarship that underpins it. Example 1 above is fully referenced and includes editions of primary materials alongside specialist articles and monographs. Example 2, on the other hand, offers no bibliographical information.

Finding Electronic Journals on the Net

The JBM Library catalogue provides links to electronic resources including journals marked with a  Use SFX services symbol. Many of these journals are provided by JSTOR and represent full runs of past issues up until a few years of the present. Others represent runs of subscribed journals from the time electronic subscriptions became available. This is usually only within the past few years. In addition there are some journals published exclusively on the internet. A listing of such journals is available from The History Journals Guide.

Primary Source Materials on the Net

The web is an increasingly useful resource for access to primary materials, some of which have been published exclusively on the web. Broadly speaking there are three kinds of primary resource accessible via the web:

  • Electronic versions of conventionally published editions of source materials.
  • Scanned reproductions of archival documents.
  • Documents produced for publication on the web.

Electronic versions
This form of web publication is increasingly popular because such material is comparatively easily produced by scanning conventional hard copy publications. Copyright regulations, however, restrict the kind of editions that can legitimately be so reproduced. As a consequence web-based versions of printed sources often depend on old and not necessarily very scholarly editions. Before using such editions, check whether more recent / scholarly editions exist.
The advantage of electronic editions is that the material is searchable, either by using a keyword search (press 'Edit' followed by 'Find in Page...') or, with some sites, using more sophisticated search facilities.
Two good examples of electronic versions of material first published conventionally are The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials and Norman Davis's edition of The Paston Letters (volume 1 only). This last allows for sophisticated searching. Such editions make it possible to search quickly for particular persons, places, or subjects or alternatively to investigate the way particular vocabulary and concepts were used.
Some electronic editions use the technology to allow the reader to explore the text in ways that would be difficult with conventional print editions. A good example is the hypertext edition of Bracton, The Laws and Customs of England.

Scanned reproductions
This technology can allow one privileged access to primary materials whether manuscript or print that may otherwise be found only in an archive office or a rare books library. Good examples are Early English Books Online, The Making of America, and the Duderstadt digital municipal archive. Archive offices will increasingly make use of this technology as a means of delivering access to holdings.

Documents produced for publication on the web
There is a miscellany of material that exists only as web documents. A number of these are first person narratives of one sort or another, notably oral history. Some examples are Louisiana Holocaust Survivors, Hiroshoma Survivors, and Slave Narratives.

Finding Primary Source Material on the Web

Numbers of sites ('gateways') provide access to primary sources. Unfortunately, the ephemeral nature of so much web publication means that, unless sites are revised frequently, not all links will be current. Sometimes this is simply because the address (URL) has changed, but in other instances the site no longer exists.
A wide range of materials may be found on York History Web. This site is largely confined to complete or at least more substantial texts rather than, as is widely found, brief extracts.
More widely known are the Internet History Sourcebooks compiled by Paul Halsall. Best known are the Internet Medieval Sourcebook and the Internet Modern Sourcebook, but other related pages are linked to these. Many, but by no means all the documents listed on these sites consist of brief extracts from longer texts.

Medieval gateways:
ORB: Online Reference Book for Medieval Studies
The Labyrinth  

Early Modern gateways:
Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, Toronto

General gateways:
Intute: Arts and Humanities

Finding General Historical Sites on the Web

In addition to the gateways noted above (under Finding Primary Source Material on the Web), the following gateways may be useful:

University of York Library and Archives: Subject Resources: History

Medieval:
Virtual Library Index: Medieval Europe
Netsurf: Internet Connections for Medieval Resources

Early Modern:
Virtual Library Frühe Neuzeit
Early Modern Resources

Others:
WWW Virtual Library: Central Catalogue
Academic Info: History Resources
Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library

Searching for materials using gateways or pages containing numbers of categorised links is the equivalent of using a bibliography -- sites are pre-selected and categorised under specific subject headings. An alternative way of accessing historical materials is to use a search engine. This allows access to a much larger range of materials, though equally a much larger range of dross. There are many search engines available, though some of the best known are only able to access part of the internet, particularly commercial sites. A site widely used by academics is Google (http://www.google.co.uk). This allows for simple word searches or for more advanced searches.

Example.
Searching on 'South Sea Bubble' on 5 August 2002, Google offered some 72,500 'hits'. Repeating this search on 19 April 2007 revealed some 1,320,000 hits, although on both occasions only the first few would be of any real value. The first item listed in 2007 (The South Sea Company) was a Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia entries often appear very high up in any search. Some entries are moderately well informed, but many are of dubious quality. Some offer further links and even references and bibliographical data – this article cites two works published in 1960. At number eight (and the first obviously academic website signalled by the edu. in the URL) is a Harvard University site that links directly to their The South Sea Bubble Project. This is noted as © 2007 and contains a brief history, facsimiles of modern historical writings, and a substantial number of digital images of contemporary documents and prints. If, however, one was specifically looking for bibliographical material relating to the South Sea Bubble, then a search on 'South Sea Bubble bibliography' would have identified two useful sites as the first two items and a bibliography from the Baker Library of Harvard University on the second page.

The web can be particularly effective if looking for brief biographical material or information about specific localities. Some aspects of the past, such as details of battles, genealogical information, historic buildings etc., are especially well represented.

Citing Web-based Material

The most commonly used convention is to provide author and title (if available) plus the full URL of the site cited followed in brackets by the date on which the site was accessed. For example:

'The Housewife's Rich Cabinet: Remedies, Recipes, and Helpful Hints', <http://www.folger.edu/public/exhibit/Housewives/housewif.htm> (5 August 2002)

I. Mather, Cases of Conscience concerning evil Spirits Personating Men, Witchcrafts, infallible Proofs of Guilt in such as are accused with that Crime (Boston, 1693), consulted online at Salem Witch Trials: Documentary Archive and Transcription Project <http://etext.virginia.edu/salem/witchcraft/speccol> (5 August 2002)

An example of a reference to a conventionally published work made available on the internet would be:
H. Taylor, The Claim of Englishwomen to the Suffrage Constitutionally Considered (London, 1867), consulted online at <http://www.indiana.edu/~letrs/vwwp/taylor/suffrage.html> (5 August 2002)

A much fuller, but slightly different guide to conventions is Maurice Crouse, 'Citing Electronic Information in History Papers'.
 

Page authored and posted by P.J.P.Goldberg, 2002, revised 2004, 2007.

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