Austin Gee, ed. Royal Historical Society Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History. Publications of 1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. xv + 444 pp. $150.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-815294-1.
Reviewed by Stephen Roberts (History of Parliament Trust, London)
Published on H-Albion (June, 2001)
Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh (Ecclesiastes xii. 12).
This annual compilation is a useful measure of the expansion of historical productivity. The 1991 volume in this series listed 1504 books and 3303 articles by 4061 authors. The 1998 volume lists 2033 books and 3755 articles, by 5360 authors. This crude data suggests an increase in the number of authors by 31 percent, in books by 35 percent and in articles by 14 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the ratio of authors to works published remained remarkably constant through the 1990s, however, at 1.2 works per author. The structure of each annual volume remains largely (and helpfully) constant: a mix of general categories (Collective Volumes, Long Periods) and periodized treatments of "Britain," "England," "England and Wales," "Medieval Wales," "Scotland Before the Union," "Ireland," "Empire," "Empire and Commonwealth." Titles in languages other than English are not neglected, so that the volumes provide a much wider coverage than simply publications of Anglophone countries. Each section has a contributing editor (there are 15 for this volume) under a general editor.
These annual volumes supplement the RHS CD-ROM that comprehensively lists publications to 1992, and further technical developments are in hand. It is planned that in May 2002 a website incorporating the material in this volume and its predecessors will go on-line.[1] This has involved re-editing 19,000 titles in the 1993-1996 annuals, and an on-line bibliography will allow much more sophisticated searches than the traditional indexing of the printed annuals, exhaustive though that is. It is to be hoped that the hard copy annuals will continue to appear once the on-line facility is available, so that the interests of the less technologically minded or provided for can continue to be recognized. The arguments in favor of continuing to produce hard copy may rapidly become less compelling once electronic publishing is embraced, however.
Behind the glamour of new technological opportunities, however, lie some traditional virtues and traditional problems. At the heart of this enterprise are the comparatively unsung efforts of the editors: if ever there was a labor of love for the historical profession, this is it. The scale of the enterprise and the number of publications surveyed demand the respect of every user of this facility. The RHS bibliographies have always drawn on the expertise of the library staff of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London, who search the literature for the references cited. The centrality of the IHR library helps explain the efficiency of the data-gathering operation, but may also account for the occasional absence of a periodical. In the field of British local and regional history, for example, Morgannwg, the journal of Glamorgan history, is curiously absent. It is a publication to which the IHR does not subscribe. More understandable is the cut-off point by which the less academic journals are not searched--The Local Historian is in, Local History Magazine out--but the preface to the volume does not make these criteria explicit. There are also a few inconsistencies of practice within the volume. In some sections, titles in languages other than English are translated in square brackets, in others, not, and the range of interests of editors must continue to have a bearing on the final product. It is hard to believe that nothing in the Welsh language was published in 1998 on the history of England and Wales 1500-1714, for example. These anomalies are trivial when set against the achievement of the RHS series, and in the context of the impending technological leap forward into electronic publishing, are reassuring evidence of the persisting hard choices of the bibliographer's art.
Note
[1]. Now available online as: "The Royal Historical Society Bibliography (in association with Irish History Online and London's Past Online): A guide to writing about British and Irish History" http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/.
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Citation:
Stephen Roberts. Review of Gee, Austin, ed., Royal Historical Society Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History. Publications of 1998.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5267
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