I have shared this information with the Irish Diaspora list. I think it will also interest a number of the H-Net lists.

1.
There is now a substantial and developing Irish Diaspora component to the searchable historiographic database at Irish History Online.

The original Irish History Online was set up in 2003 with funding from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, to create a fully-searchable bibliographical database of publications on Irish history.
To date, titles of publications covering 1936-2001 (over 50,000 items) are available for on-line searching, and IHO has become the 'Irish' component of the Royal Historical Society's online 'Bibliography of British and Irish History'.

See
Irish History Online (IHO) www.irishhistoryonline.ie And THE RHS BIBLIOGRAPHY http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/bibwel.asp

A second three-year tranche of IRCHSS funding has been awarded (to run from 2006-9), with a special remit to enhance IHO's coverage of the Irish abroad/Irish diaspora, as well as publications on mainstream Irish history published outside Ireland and Britain.

I have, of course, put the resources of the Irish Diaspora list and www.irishdiaspora.net at the service of Irish History Online, the Principal Investigator, Professor Jackie Hill, and IHO editor, Dr Frank Cullen.

2.
So that there is now in existence these linked historiographic resources, of interest to historians, throughout the world, of all the places that the British Empire strayed or sojourned, and all of us in successor states and communities.

I stress that both Irish History Online and the RHS bibliography are FREE, high quality web resources - as an outsider visitor to the backrooms of the projects I am impressed by the commitment to historiographic quality.

I say this because there is some anecdotal evidence that university librarians, for example, are sometimes reluctant to list these resources on library web sites. Things they pay for they automatically list - things that are FREE they have to be persuaded to look at, and have to be convinced are good. I have urged the members of the Irish Diaspora list to go forth and persuade, and I do likewise here.

3
I have also suggested to members of the Irish Diaspora list that they look through the older Irish Diaspora entries and make sure that nothing important has been missed. I have especially urged the historians to check their own works in the databases - after all, no one knows your publication record better than you do. And, in this case, modesty is not a virtue.

At both web sites
Irish History Online (IHO) www.irishhistoryonline.ie And THE RHS BIBLIOGRAPHY http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/bibwel.asp
There are procedures to offer comment, feedback and, through ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS, to suggest entries for the databases.

Having watched the projects in action I can say that there is always about a 1 year time lag as the projects pick up new material, and they can NOT (of course) list forthcoming material. So, we should keep an eye on these resources, check through older material, ADD and CORRECT as need be, use them, recommend them and value them.

Patrick O'Sullivan

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Patrick O'Sullivan
Head of the Irish Diaspora Research Unit

Email Patrick O'Sullivan <P.OSullivan@bradford.ac.uk> Email Patrick O'Sullivan <patrickos@irishdiaspora.net> Personal Fax 0044 (0) 709 236 9050

Irish Diaspora Studies http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/diaspora/
Irish Diaspora Net
http://www.irishdiaspora.net

Irish Diaspora Research Unit
Department of Social Sciences and Humanities University of Bradford Bradford
BD7 1DP Yorkshire England