British History Online

Recently, the library took a license to a new database for its collection: British History Online. British History Online (BHO) is a collection of nearly 1300 volumes of primary and secondary sources relating to British and Irish (legal) history, and histories of empire and the British world.

BHO is a not-for-profit digital library based at the Institute of Historical Research in London. It brings together material for British history from the collections of libraries, archives, museums and academics. These primary and secondary sources, which range from medieval to twentieth century, are easily searchable and browsable.

It is a digital library particularly concerned with texts relating to the British history, which includes the countries that are currently part of the United Kingdom, as well as Ireland from the Norman invasion in 1169 up to the creation of the Free State in 1922. Also materials from Britain’s colonial history and materials relating to British diplomacy abroad are included. The collection focuses primarily on the period between 1300 and 1800, but there are texts relating to everything from Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain to the twentieth century.

There are also subject guides which are designed to guide you through some of the materials that are available on BHO. Each subject guide has been created by a scholar who specialises in that particular area.

You can interact with BHO content in two ways: by searching or by browsing.

Searching

You can do keyword searches, title searches or combined searches. You can use Boolean searches, and also narrow your search results to focus on a specific subject, place, period, and/or source type.

BHO preserves historical spelling and typographical errors from the original printed texts so words, especially names, may appear under variant spellings. One way to account for variant spellings is to use fuzzy searching.

Fuzzy searchingmatches the string of letters in a search term approximately rather than exactly. The search syntax is the search term, followed by a tilde, followed by a number between 0 and 1 (the default is 0.5). The closer the value is to 1, the more exact the results will be. This search is based on the Levenshtein Distance algorithm:

• John~
• John~0.7

The first search (which is a default of 0.5) will return less exact results than the second search. 

Browsing

You can browse the BHO catalogue of primary sources, secondary texts, guides and calendars, maps, and datasets. Most of the volumes are part of series; those that are single publications will be listed as such. You can sort by title or by number of volumes. You may browse the series or publications associated with a specific place, subject, period, or source type.

Researchers are already using the database:

“For my PhD research on economic sovereignty in late medieval England, I gratefully use British History online. The database contains digitized editions of essential sources for my research such as the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England and the Calendar of the Patent Rolls. This allows me to consult this material from Tilburg and that saves a lot of travel time to and from England. An additional advantage is that the material is fully digitally searchable, so that important information can be found quickly”.

If you want more information on the database contents, this can be found in the above mentioned Subject guides; help and support can be found in the Using BHO pages.

But you can also contact Tilburg University’s law librarian, Eric van den Akker.