History and Civilization Research Guide

ThisResearch Guide  provides information on EUI Library holdings in the humanities and history, and on the Library's electronic resources for historians.

History, by definition, 'cannibalizes' all kinds of primary and secondary sources. In the Department of History and Civilization (HEC), history takes a 'longue durée' perspective even when the goal of the research is to understand the origins of today’s Europe and contemporary problems. In addition, interdisciplinary methods are often shared with other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities.

The academic profile of the Department has always had a decisive impact on the kind of services provided and, also, on the collection-building processes at the EUI Library, the first service offered to support the research of the Department.

• Accessing EUI Library collections
• Accessing scholarly digital information and documentation
• History research environment and EUI library hybrid collections
• Contacts 

 

Accessing EUI Library collections

All Library materials can be found using the Library Catalogue, OPAC, which is available in two formats:

• a traditional OPAC, called Innovative Millennium
• Encore, a fresher and more semantic catalogue 

 

Accessing scholarly digital information and documentation

Scholarly literature and primary sources are also found outside the Library OPAC, and physical library collections within multi-lingual, web-based scientific projects.  

The present research guide offers an A-Z list of web-based documentation and resources selected for historians, from the whole EUI Library electronic resources and from free accessible internet resources.

The changing research topics in the Department has an impact and influences the need to access scientific materials using web-based methods, but it is impossible to purchase all the materials requested.

Accessing web-based information and documentation is done at the EUI Library, without abandoning the traditional collection development policies and through a decisive complementary service like the Inter Library Loan for out of print or very specific materials.

The challenge of the new semantic and socially networked internet world to modern academic libraries, is one of the most delicate and difficult issue to deal with. Accessing information and documentation today means to continue to develop traditional acquisitions policies for building history e-collections and, also, looking at freely accessible digital library contents.

The recently launched European History Primary Sources portal (EHPS) is an example of access to free, web-based documentation. This portal, like the WWW History Central Catalogue, is a complement to library-owned collections. EHPS is using new interactive ways offered by the web technologies (RSS Feeds, Facebook and Twitter) for accessing new, not owned nor subscribed, scholarly digital collections.  

EHPS has been presented during the international conference, CULTURAL HERITAGE online. Empowering users: an active role for user communities, 15-16 December 2009, Florence, Italy. Proceedins available:  The European University Institute European History Primary Sources (EHPS) Portal.

 

History research environment and EUI library hybrid collections

Constructing history collections and offering services to support doctoral and post-doctoral research at the EUI today, in a world where the pillars of traditional knowledge-building are challenged by the new media and the internet, has become a complex activity.  Material documents and digital information and documentation are integrated in the EUI library collections. Historians have to access both for supporting their research activities.

Because of the web, authors, editors, distributors and libraries are changing their role and professional functions; authorship and authority, permanence of objects, preservation of the documentation for stable access in the future, are all challenged concepts in today’s scholarly processes.

Instead, preservation, validation, selection, together with, instability, disappearance, volatility, are some of the new concepts which are redesigning both the way to search for and use digital scholarly information and documentation inside a fluid term and unstable concept referred to as a 'history collection'.

These digital mutations and new methods derived from the 'digital turn' in history are explored in the Atelier Multimédia.