Investigations of a Dog

Recently I have mostly bought:

1. John Adamson, The Civil Wars (Palgrave Macmillan, May 2008).  
2. Judith M. Bennett, History Matters (University of Pennsylvania Press, September 2007).  
3. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642-1649 (OUP Oxford, February 2008).  
4. Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’ (Manchester University Press, April 2007).  
5. Patrick Little, Oliver Cromwell (Palgrave Macmillan, November 2008).  
6. Tim Padfield, Copyright for Records Managers and Archivists (Facet Publishing, January 2007).  

I think Donagan’s War in England is probably the most expensive book I’ve ever bought.

SAGE Publications are having another free trial month. Just go to this page and register and you can get free access to SAGE Journals until the end of April.

Also it’s nearly a year since my first article was published in War In History, so I’ll be able to publish a pre-print here soon.

Via Ben Brumfield and Archaetech I’ve heard about the InterFace conference on humanities and technology, which will take place at Southampton University in July. Although it looks a bit more formal than THATCamp, the speed dating and lightning presentations should make it very different from traditional humanities conferences. The deadline for submissions is 1st May. I’ll probably put one in myself if I can come up with a good enough idea.

The March edition of the Military History Carnival is now up at the American Presidents Blog. Also the carnival has a  new submission form, so don’t use the old one.

As I mentioned last week, EThOS is now open to the public. This is the British Library’s new online service for delivering copies of UK PhD theses, replacing the old British Thesis Service which used to supply copies on paper or microfilm. Although the site is officially in beta most features seem to be fully working. Right now there’s only a basic search (you can’t limit your search to specific fields) but it accepts wildcards and should be enough to find what you want if you know what you’re looking for. Searches can be limited to theses which are available for immediate download.

Theses are being digitized on demand. If someone has already requested and received a copy of a thesis then it will be available immediately for anyone else who wants it. There is no charge for downloading a thesis which has already been digitized, but you have to pay the cost of printing and binding if you prefer a hard copy. The publicity last year suggested that the first person to request a thesis would have to pay the costs of digitization, but now it looks like this will rarely happen because many university libraries have agreed to pay for digitization of their own theses as part of their commitment to open access. Once a new thesis has been requested digitization is promised in 10 working days although a notice on the site says there might be delays because of heavy demand. I ordered an undigitized thesis today (D. E. Lewis on the parliamentarian ordnance office – something I would have read during my PhD if I’d known about it), so we’ll see how long it takes.

Searching for “english civil war” limited to theses already available I got a couple of hits (there are lots more for “first world war”) and downloaded David Evans’s thesis on Edward Massey. I found it slightly annoying that I had to go through a checkout process even though the download was free, but it’s still an awful lot more convenient than paying around £50 and waiting several weeks the last time I ordered a thesis. The digital file is a PDF but it comes inside a zip file. That seemed slightly pointless as it didn’t make the download significantly smaller (12MB zipped, 14MB unzipped) and means that you can’t view the thesis straight away in your browser. It might make sense if multiple orders were combined in the same zip file, but even if you have more than one thesis in your basket you still have to download and unzip each one separately.

It looks like most UK universities are participating in the scheme, but significantly Oxford and Cambridge aren’t. Although their theses show up in the search results they can’t be ordered through the site. This might just result in fewer people bothering to read and cite theses from the big two, so it could be their loss as much as anyone else’s.

Overall I’m really impressed with this site. There are some minor things that could be improved, and it crashes occasionally, but it’s obviously going to be a very useful resource. I’m particularly pleased that in most cases users won’t have to pay for theses. I hope this will encourage people to be more adventurous about which theses they consult.

I’m finally back to blogging after a few months off. This post is a quick roundup of some things that happened while I was away.

First of all, the Military History Carnival always needs more hosts. Although it’s not my responsibility any more I’d like to see it continue, so if you can help please contact TJ at tj$linzy$@$gmail$.$com (remove the dollar signs)..

I’ve deactivated my Facebook account as I was finding the whole thing too annoying. I’ve opened an account at LinkedIn but I’m not sure if I’m going to use it. It seems very much aimed at The Businessman In His Suit And Tie. Does anyone use it, and is it any use? I’d like to see a social networking site specifically designed for academics. Maybe with facilities to self-archive our publications.

The Great War Archive (which I posted about here) opened on time in November, and looks really good. They’re also continuing to collect submissions through a Flickr group. Reviews in History have published a review by Esther MacCallum-Stewart and a response by Stuart Lee. This project gives us proof that there are lots of interesting documents in private hands and that at least some people are willing to share them on the web if given the chance. Although 6,500 documents sounds like a lot I suspect it’s a tiny fraction of what’s still out there.

The 1911 census has been released early (but some counties aren’t available yet). Although access is relatively expensive you get very good quality colour photos of the original documents: much better than the 1901 census.

EThOS, the British Library’s new online thesis sevice, is now in public beta. I’ll probably post about it in more detail later in the week, but for now I’ll just say that I’m very impressed.

I am pleased to announce that TJ Linzy of Battlefield Biker is taking over the running of the Military History Carnival until the end of 2009. Please give him all the support you can. Without hosts and submissions there can be no carnival. You can contact him at tj$linzy$@$gmail$.$com (remove the dollar signs). The transfer is still in progress but things should be running soon.

I’ve decided that I want to stop organising the Military History Carnival. Therefore I’m looking for someone to take over, provided that enough people think it’s worth continuing at all. Submissions and hosts have been hard to find recently. Sharon Howard mentioned similar problems with the History Carnival earlier this year, so maybe history carnivals have jumped the shark.

The December edition of the Military History Carnival is now up at Military History and Warfare. There will be another edition in January if anyone volunteers to host.

The December edition of the Military History Carnival will be hosted by Alex Clark at History of Warfare on 14th December. You can e-mail submissions to alexanderclark999 [at] gmail [dot] com or use the submission form.