H-Net’s Contribution to Historical Bibliography

Jim Niessen H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences OnLine

& Rutgers UniversityALA Annual in New Orleans, 26 June 2006

What do we mean by bibliography?

A collection of citationsCovering a certain topicOrganized for retrievalAdvantages of online bibliography:

work can be distributedinformation is easily retrieved

easily reorganized and updated

H-Net’s contribution

H-Net Reviews: monographic informationTOCs, Tables of Contents: journal articlesFormal and informal bibliographiesFor the future: some ideas

H-Net as a network collaboratory

172 lists or networksEach is run by its own editorsEach is its own community of interest200-15,000 subscribers in each networkEach network has its own home pageMany networks review booksMany networks have unique activities

H-Net as server and organization

Listserv distributes email to listsWeb server hosts mail logs, resourcesJobGuideAnnouncementsReviews processing and archivingGovernance: Council, internal email lists, committees, elections

H-Net Reviews http://www.h-net.org/reviews/

Review editors of lists select booksThen request them via central officeCommission reviews when books arriveEdit the reviewer’s review

Submit the review for central copyeditingE-mail distribution via individual listArchived in public web directorySearchable, PURL

Journal tables of contentsVolunteers submit TOCs for journals they are responsible forMay be selected to fit the interest of the groupVolunteers may lose interest and stopTOCs may not be archived in one place

H-Soz-u-Kult:

Journals submit complete TOCs to the listAll are archived in one placeDatabase is searchable

Formal and informal bibliographies

H-Netters ask each other: can you recommend books on…?Formal compilations may be submittedShort responses to the list sit in the logsOr they are brought together as “threads”There is no H-Net-wide bibliography projectThere is no H-Soz-u-Kult or Clio-online bibliography project

For the future: some ideas

Continued archiving, linking of reviewsMore collaboration with publishers to collect TOCs Collect the H-Net bibliographies that are already online H-Net searching of “*bib*” directoriesUse of wikis to update bibliographies

What do you recommend?

Your ideas and suggestions todayJoin H-HistBibl http://www.h-net.org/~histbibl/

Come to the panel of the Association for the Bibliography of History (ABH) on online bibliography a the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Atlanta, January 2007