Developing a Collaborative Online Environment for History - the Experience of British History Online

This paper will discuss the potential impact
upon historical research of British History
Online's annotation tool. British History Online
(BHO) (
www.british-history.ac.uk
) is a digital
library containing some of the core printed
primary and secondary sources for the medieval
and modern history of the British Isles. Created
by the Institute of Historical Research (IHR),
which is part of the University of London's
School of Advanced Study, BHO is a rigorous
academic resource used by researchers at
postgraduate level and above. The IHR is
centrally placed within academic history in the
UK, and as such it is highly regarded within the
profession.
Two years ago, as part of an Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant,
BHO undertook to provide an annotation tool
alongside the digitisation of some 500 key
historical sources for early modern history:
the Calendars of State Papers. These calendars
summarise the manuscript heritage of the
working of the state in the early modern period.
Essential research tools though these calendars
are, they were mainly compiled in the Victorian
period, and are known to be inadequate and
erroneous in some cases. Furthermore, changes
in perspective on history and subsequent
research means that the calendars are badly
in need of updating: papers which modern
editors would think worthy of close attention
are sometimes treated very cursorily. BHO's
annotation tool encourages the community
of scholars to update, enlarge upon, and
correct the calendars, and even to supply fuller
transcriptions of documents.
At the planning stage of the tool's development
the team looked at other online tools for user
commenting, ranging from scholarly collections
such as the Digital Image Archive of Medieval
Music to non-academic sites such as the blog-
style Diary of Samuel Pepys. This paper will
describe the reasons why we decided that
an annotation tool was preferable to a wiki,
the design process for the tool, and BHO's
subsequent attempts to engage the academic
community in online collaborative work: now
that the AHRC project has finished (but the
annotation tool remains active) DH 2010 will be
a good time to assess the successes and failures
this aspect of the project and the lessons that
might be applicable to other digital resources
for historians. The IHR is now involved in a
collaborative project, Connected Histories, and
the lessons of BHO's annotation tool will have
a direct bearing on how the front end for
Connected Histories is designed.
The paper will also touch upon the issues
of moderation of academic work, the role of
citation within web 2.0, and the constraints
we imposed on annotators in this regard,
intellectual copyright and the RAE, and
the broader question of how humanities
research culture might change as web-based
collaboration becomes the norm.
The IHR is currently addressing the question
of how the research community within
history might be mobilised to work together
online, in more general ways, with European
collaboration, semantic web research tools, and
VREs. The paper will conclude by briefly placing
these in the context of work already done on the
annotation tool.
References
Blaney, J. and Winters, J.
. 'The British
History Online digital library: a model for
sustainability?'.
Bulletin of the Belgian Royal
Historical Commission
.
MacGregor, J., et al.
(2009). 'Revolutionary
reading, evolutionary toolmaking:
(Re)development of scholarly reading and
annotation tools in response to an ever-
changing scholarly climate, Implementing
New Knowledge Environments'. University of
Victoria, October 2009.
http://bit.ly/c5LV4R
.
Connected Histories.
www.connectedhistories.
org
(accessed 25-03-2010).

2
Diary of Samuel Pepys.
www.pepysdiary.com
(accessed 25-03-2010).
Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music.
www.
diamm.ac.uk
(accessed 25-03-2010).
Diigo.
http://www.diigo.com/
(accessed
26-03-2010).
Horizon Project.
http://www.nmc.org/horizon
(accessed 25-03-2010).
Zotero.
http://www.zotero.org/
(accessed
26-03-2010).