Bringing together European historical bibliographies

Making lists and overviews is one of my typical habits. I am always glad to find online overviews of projects and websites or portals to an entire range of projects. Thus every now and then I used the portal European Historical Bibliographies (HistBib), hosted by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW). Only last week I saw this portal had been archived on January 14, 2021. It is clear I do not regularly use this portal, but having quick access to these historical bibliographies can be most useful. In this post I will report on my efforts to find a similar commented overview of these important online resources, because using the right bibliography can make a huge difference for your research. Almost all reources I mention are accessible in open access. Among other reasons to create a new list is the fact yet again a relevant database, the Digitale Bibliografie Nederlandse Geschiedenis, will disappear in its current form in July 2021.

More than a dozen

When using HistBib my impression was always that it covered more or less some twenty countries, but I should have looked more closely. For Germany five bibliographies were shown. HistBib contained bibliographies for only twelve countries with an additional bibliography for Eastern Europe. It soon becomes clear a number of links had not been updated, nor had there been any effort to widen its scope to cover more countries. Reading at the portal about a conference on historical bibliographies organized by the BBAW did not lighten up my mood, because this, too, did not work as a spur to update the portal and to maintain correct links to bibliographies and contributing organisations. Perhaps the portal was more a project for a couple of years than a lasting and durable presence in the virtual world. However, the BBAW does continue its online bibliographic service for the Jahresberichte für deutsche Geschichte.

Surely one of the leading thoughts to end the HistBib portal can have been the assumption that it is easy to find these European historical bibliographies with the Great and Omnipresent search firm. Surely some national libraries would provide the kind of list I expected, but often these institutions refer to HistBib. The news of its closure travels slow! In many other cases libraries put a small number of historical bibliographies in a list with often only an alphabetical order. Retaining the original names which are not necessarily in English is not helping you to find easily the right item, and often any comment is lacking, let alone an indication of open or licensed access.

Although telling the full tale of my brief quest for a complete overview replacing HistBib would be instructive, I think it is better to help you here with examples of a few helpful lists and commented overviews, and adding at the end my own concisely annotated list of current online historical bibliographies for a larger number of European countries.

Historicum, the portal with the Deutsche Historische Bibliographie, one of the five online bibliographies for German history, does you the service of not only mentioning the other four, and the twelve country bibliographies available at HistBib, but also links to other bibliographies for German history and further relevant resources. Heuristiek, the portal for historical heuristics at Ghent University, has a page with bibliographies for Early Modern history, alas only in alphabetical order and without comments, but at least with indications of those bibliographies only accessibie for staff and students of Ghent University. Another Belgian university, the Université de Liège, has in its Guide bibliographique en Histoire a page Bibliographies transpériodes with in clear sections both national and historical bibliographies for a number of European countries. The page contains a fair amount of useful comments and indications about bibliographies in print and online. For Scandinavian countries the Safir portal of Lund University proved most helpful. The page on Bok- och bibliothesväsen contains in clear sections with commented links what you expect from a research institution, inluding useful cross references.

It was a joy to see that the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford put in a blog post published in 2009 about an online bibliography for Spanish history a generous list of other similar online bibliographies. A few years ago I applauded here the online guides for British legal history created by the Bodleian Libraries. However, this information at first seemed not to have been included at the main website or in its LibGuides. In fact it looked like some of these bibliographies could not be traced at all at this website or in the research guides. Enter Oxford Bibliographies, but alas I could not quickly detect in this rich resource the kind of list provided elswehere in Oxford. In this case I hope sincerely I did not search properly, and I would be glad to put things right; luckily I could rather quickly find an overview for nine countries in the research guide of the Bodleian for Early Modern history.

One list?

My search for an overview at least giving you the information at HistBib was not as straightforward as you might like it to be. Among the most helpful resources are databases, but you are tempted to skip them because they do not always show up readily for online search engines. The German Datenbank-Infosystem (DBIS) proved to be helpful. The search results lead to separate pages with well-organized information about resources. Although sometimes you approach subjects from a more general level this does help you to broaden your vision.

The main answer to the question of finding one list is in the end simply negative. For some countries there is currently not any online historical bibliography, or even not one in print, or not anymore. Some countries were for centuries part of another country. Iceland in particular is an example. Some countries are too small to make efforts for a separate historical bibliography sensible at all, sometimes a historical bibliography has been integrated into a national bibliography or search portal. Often you will want to find literature for a particular period in European history or for a period in the history of a single country or a region. Using national bibliographies can mean you face nationalist influences, but you cannot evade nationalism by simply ignoring its existence. Creating a commented list of national bibliographies comes with the clear need for some annotation about creators, hosting institutions, time range and the presence of interface in more than one language. I am afraid I cannot immediately succeed in offering all these elements in my own attempt at a list. Many online research guides with a page for online bibliographies mention also union catalogues and digital libraries, and even mix them with each other. To me this seems a failure to see the need for clear distinction between national bibliographies, historical bibliographies, national meta-catalogues and digital portals. It is not just a matter of personal taste that information becomes more valuable by its structure, presentation and annotation.

In my memory in the eighties going to the card catalogue at Utrecht University Library implied you had to pass first the stacks with printed bibliographies. Thus even if you did not use them you could not be totally unaware of them. Faithful readers will recognize my quib about those people who know and use bibliographies and those who do not. I suppose this memory influences me in wanting to see or create this overview. You might think I prefer web pages with relevant information, but having tagged information in a database is more powerful. Over the years I have become more aware of the hard work done by librarians, catalogers and bibliographers to help scholars. Bibliographical resources can be extremely helpful for your research, not in the least by showing you contexts and the fact you can build on or critically review earlier relevant publications. Bibliographies are as important as (meta-)-catalogues and online repositories. 

A provisional list

While working on this post and gathering information concerning online historical country bibliographies I surely realized bibliographies in print can still be very important, too. The list here below has a clear focus as one of its qualities. Another wish for creating a similar list of online bibliographies for legal history for particular, too, grew on my mind. I do mention some examples on my legal history website Rechtshistorie, mainly on the pages for digital libraries, the history of the common law and Old Dutch law. However that may be, I prefer to stick to the purpose of this post. As for the new list with for now just concise comments and indications, it is surely open for comments, corrections and enhancements, and I am still contemplating the right permanent spot for it, perhaps here at the page with research guides. At my website the page for digital libraries seems the logical location, because you can find there already useful overviews of gateways to official gazettes, constitutions, foreign treaties, and a number of bibliographies for early printed books. A search for a bibliography for early printed books from Sweden eventually led to this post and this list, however uneven and in some details surely amusing, too. It is funny to see at least one database which has been integrated into another one some years ago yet still existing also on its own. It is disturbing to note the second bibliography for this country is scheduled for disappearance in its current form by June 30, 2021. In this respect my Dutch view in this post is not happy.

The opening of this list with two websites for Eastern Europe is a tribute to online research portals for Eastern European and Slavic studies. I was much impressed by the country guides for this region created by the International and Area Studies Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL.

A postscript

Amazingly the HistBib portal could again be visited at is old web address in November 2021, without any modification. The Dutch Royal Library announced the DBNG will eventually resurface as part of the Dutch GGC cataloguing system hosted by OCLC, without indicating a timeline or a new URL. Here below I added a resource for finding articles on Icelandic history.

European historical bibliographies online

Eastern Europe

– Bibliotheks- und Bibliographie-Portal, Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung, Marburg – https://hds.hebis.de/herder/index.php – publications since 1994
– The European Bibliography of Slavic and East European Studies (EBSEES) – https://ebsees.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/ – functioning between 1991 and 2007, no longer updated; interface English

Austria

– Österreichische Historische Bibliographie (ÖHB), Universität Klagenfurt – http://oehb.aau.at/ – from 1945 onwards

Belgium

– Bibliografie van de Geschiedenis van België / Bibliographie de l’Histoire de Belgique (BGB-BHB) – http://www.rbph-btfg.be/nl_biblio.html – covers 1952-2008; interface Dutch, French and English
– BGB-BHB, Archives de l’État en Belgique – https://biblio.arch.be/webopac/Vubis.csp?Profile=BHBBGB&OpacLanguage=dut – publications since 2009; interface Dutch, French, German and English

Czech Republic

– Bibliografie dějin Českých zemí (BDCZ), Czech Academy of Sciences – https://biblio.hiu.cas.cz/ – interface Czech, English and German – with also digitized bibliographical yearbooks 

Denmark

– Dansk Historisk Bibliografi , Det Kongelige Bibliotek, Copenhagen- https://aleph.kb.dk/F/?func=file&file_name=welcome&local_base=dhb01

France

– Bibliographie annuelle de l’Histoire de France (BHF), CNRS and Bibliothèque nationale de France – https://biblio-bhf.fr/ – search interface in English

Germany

– Jahresberichte für Deutsche Geschichte (JBG), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften – http://jdgdb.bbaw.de/cgi-bin/jdg/cgi-bin/jdg – publications 1949-2015; interface German and English
– Jahresberichte für Deutsche Geschichte (JDG), BBAW, Berlin – vol. 1-14 (1925-1938) – http://pom.bbaw.de/JDG/
– Historische Bibliographie Online, Oldenburg Wissenschaftsverlag and Arbeitsgemeeinschaft historischer Forschungseinrichtungen (AHF) – https://historische-bibliographie.degruyter.com/ – publications since 1990, no longer updated since 2015
– Deutsche Historische Bibliographie (DHB), Historicum – https://www.historicum.net/dhb/ – with links to other (regional) bibliographies, in particular the Virtuelle Deutsche Landesbibliographie, and other bibliographic resources – a simple search in the search field of the top menu bar leads to the beta version of an interface in German and English
– Bibliographischer Informationsdienst, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich – https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/bibliothek/literatursuche/bibliografischer-informationsdienst – for 20th century history, access after registration, with a PDF-archive

Hungary

– Humanities Bibliographical Database (Humanus) – http://www.oszk.hu/humanus/index.html – with a section for history; interface Hungarian, English and German
– EHM: Elektronikus Periodika Archivum (EPA) – Humanus – Matarka (for Hungarian journals since 1800) – http://ehm.ek.szte.hu/ehm?p=0 – a portal with access to Humanus and three other resources, in particular for journals

Iceland

– Íslandssaga í greinum [Icelandic history in articles], Gunnar Karlsson and Gudmundur Jónson, National University Reykjavik – https://soguslodir.hi.is/ritaskra/ – a database with 13,500 articles, updated until 2005, for some journals until 2015

Ireland

– Irish History Online, Royal irisch Academy, Dublin – https://www.ria.ie/irish-history-online – with links to external resources for Irish history

Italy

– Bibliografia Storica Nazionale (dal 2000) (BSN), Giunta Centrale per gli Studi Storici – https://www.gcss.it/easyweb/w7044/index.php?scelta=campi&&biblio=GSS&lang= – publications since 2000; interface Italian, English, German, French and Spanish
– BSN Catalogo Retrospettivo – https://www.gcss.it/easyweb/w7044/index.php?scelta=campi&&biblio=E7043&lang= – interface Italian, English, German, French and Spanish

Lithuania

– Lietuvos Istorijos Bibliografia – https://aleph.library.lt/F?func=option-update-lng&P_CON_LNG=LIT – interface Lithuanian and English

Netherlands

– Digitale Bibliografie Nederlandse Geschiedenis (DBNG), Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague and Huygens Institute, Amsterdam – https://www.dbng.nl – interface Dutch and English – no updates after 2016, end of current service June 30, 2021
– Historie in Titels (HinT) – http://picarta.nl/DB=3.30/LNG=NE/ – licensed resource, not anymore updated since 2005, originally created at the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA) – interface Dutch, English and German

Norway

– Historisk bibliografi (Norhist), Nasjonalbiblioteket, Oslo – https://www.nb.no/baser/norhist/ – for the period 1980-1997

Poland

– Bibliografia historii polskiej, Instytut Pamięci Narodowej – https://www.bibliografia.ipn.gov.pl/ – access seems to be currently unsafe or disabled; https://bibliografia.ipn.gov.pl/ appears with a notice “offline”

Spain

– Indice Histórico Español (IHE), Revistes Cientifiques de la Universitat de Barcelona – https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/IHE/index – a bibliographical journal
– Modernitas: Bibliografia de Historia Moderna, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CSIC) – http://www.moderna1.ih.csic.es/modernitas/principal.htm
– Indices, CSIC – https://indices.csic.es/ – a general scientific bibliography with attention to the humanities; interface Spanish and English

Sweden

– Svensk Historisk Bibliografi – digital 1771-2010 (SHBd), Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholm – https://shb.kb.se/F/?func=file&file_name=find-b&local_base=shb – also available as an app

Switzerland

– Bibliographie der Schweizergeschichte (BSG), Schweizerische Nationalbibliothek, Bern – https://www.nb.admin.ch/snl/de/home/recherche/bibliografien/bsg.html – interface German, French, Italian and English

United Kingdom

– Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH) – https://www.history.ac.uk/publications/bibliography-british-and-irish-history – licensed resource hosted by Brepols