Irish History Online Project History

Since the online version first went live in 2004, Irish History Online has proved to be a highly useful and reliable bibliographic reference resource for researchers and students in the field of Irish history. The database currently contains almost 70,000 records (December 2009). The good news is that despite serious funding setbacks in 2009 Irish History Online will continue to be available online as a free resource into the future.

Drawing on decades of voluntary work by compilers and editors of "Writings in Irish history", the compilation of Irish History Online continues to rely principally on the work of volunteers. The creation and publication of an online version from earlier printed bibliographies, and its continuation as an online resource to the present time, was made possible through project grants from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2003-6 and 2006-9. In 2003-6, Dr Anthony McCormack and Ms Mary Murray created the online database and input retrospective records from "Writings in Irish History" 1938-2002. In 2006-9, Dr Frank Cullen enhanced the bibliographic coverage of the history of the Irish overseas, expanded other aspects of the bibliography and input data for more recent publications. During both these phases the compilation of data on new publications was done by Ciaran Nicholson (TCD) and Máirín Cassidy (UCD), working in a voluntary capacity. The project continues to benefit from the support of the Royal Irish Academy Committee for Historical Sciences.

Irish History Online (www.irishhistoryonline.ie) is currently faced with a serious funding crisis. The second phase of funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences came to an end on 1 October 2009, and no new source of funding has yet been identified.

Since continuity of this online resource is of paramount importance, plans have now been formulated by the small team of volunteers who comprise the Irish History Online Management Committee to maintain the existing database and to continue to update the database with new bibliographic data. From January 2010 Irish History Online will be hosted on the Royal Irish Academy server in Dublin and the database will come under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy Library. Irish History Online will continue to seek funding to cover essential costs. Although different software will be used, and the web interface will be in a different style, the same data will be available. The existing domain name www.irishhistoryonline.ie will continue to be used and Irish History Online will continue to be available as a free service to users. The bibliography will continue to be updated with information about new publications.

Our partner project, the Royal Historical Society Bibliography, has faced a similar funding crisis and has opted to change to a new publication model. From 1 January 2010 a new Bibliography of British and Irish History (in partnership with the Royal Historical Society, the Institute of Historical Research, and Brepols publishers), will be offered as a subscription-only service. Further details are available on www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl

The divergent paths being taken by the two projects means that Irish History Online will no longer form the Irish component of the new Bibliography of British and Irish History. From 1 January 2010 the same retrospective Irish data will be available on both databases. We are currently exploring ways of ensuring that maximum cooperation between the two projects will continue for the future, particularly in the area of new data compilation.

In recent years the RHS Bibliography has produced a range of important innovations, including item-to-item linkage to digitised copies of certain works; combining results from the database with EndNote, the bibliographic and footnoting software, and other inter-operable resources. The new Bibliography of British and Irish History, working in association with Brepols, plans to further enhance these web-based elements of the bibliographic service it provides. In its new format Irish History Online will provide fewer of these additional features in 2010, concentrating simply on providing accurate and up-to-date bibliographic records.

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