(This is a guest contribution by Eric van den Akker, Law Librarian).
Recently, the library took a license to a new database for the library collection: British History Online.
British History Online (BHO) is a collection of nearly 1300 volumes op primary and secondary sources relating to British and Irish (legal) history, and histories of empire and the British World. BHO also provides access to 40,000 images and 10,000 tiles of historic maps of the British Isles.
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.
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 searching matches 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:
The first search (which is a default of 0.5) will return less exact results than the second search.
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