The idea of this blog is simple - to keep track of what has become an avalanche of websites offering online access to historical sources. Both as a researcher and as a teacher (I currently teach history at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom), I have found myself using the internet more and more in my work, and I'm sure it's the same for many other scholars. Students in particular rely heavily on internet sources, and historians take advantage of the ready availability of online source material to plan seminars as well as to advise undergraduates conducting research projects for long essays, theses and dissertations.
My field is modern European history, with a heavy dose of international history on the teaching side. In the past few years, I've taught or am teaching courses on East European history from 1848-1948, on the two Germanies from 1945-1990, and on the Cold War. So I cover a fair bit of ground just from these classroom courses. Add in supervising project essays and dissertations, and this gets me scurrying around the internet quite a bit.
My main expertise, however, lies in teaching and researching the Holocaust. I currently teach a special subject course, Nazism on Trial, which spans a wide variety of topics from the war years through to the present day. In the past, I've also taught courses on the social history of the Holocaust, focusing on the camps and ghettos. My own research encompasses projects ranging from the wartime knowledge of the Holocaust through to the extermination camps. I also have an ongoing research project on Holocaust denial, which led me to set up the Holocaust Controversies team blog with friends in 2006, and has resulted in various conference papers, one of which was the subject of a news story in the Jewish Chronicle in 2010.
Naturally, the online sources I highlight on this blog will inevitably be skewed towards my teaching and research interests, and I make no apologies for that. There are already several major link farms out there for many aspects of modern history, and collections of links abound on university websites. This blog won't be trying to compete with what can be achieved on such platforms.
Its purpose is more simple: to archive and make available links that I come across personally. At this stage, it doesn't necessarily matter if anyone reads the blog. The idea is simply to share the information, and use the blog in my teaching as well as my research. If, however, the idea takes off, then I'll do everything I can to include links sent in by colleagues, students and readers. Due to the inevitable deadline crunches, I'm also not going to guarantee that the blog will be updated on any kind of regular schedule.
However, what I will endeavour to do is to round up and summarise collections of links as patterns become apparent. For example, there are more and more online newspapers available, and a number of projects are currently ongoing. So I can imagine posting several updates, not just to highlight a new database or new link, but to collate all available newspapers. The same would apply for other types of sources, and for sources on particular subjects.
One final point - because of my research interests, and because of the languages that I know, the links will be pan-European. Aside from links to sites in English, this blog will highlight sites in German, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch, French, Italian, Czech and Hungarian, just counting the ones I know I have listed in my 'guide to primary sources' for students. I can also manage to make out the basics of several other European languages, as long as they're written in Latin or Cyrillic script. I'll also be highlighting a few sites which are written in Hebrew but which contain content in German and English. I cannot, however, guarantee to spotlight sites with sources written in non-European languages or in scripts other than Latin or Cyrillic.
So that's the plan. Let's see how it goes.
