This project was the fifth assignment for LIS 190: The Web as a Research Tool, a class being offered by the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California Berkeley, Spring semester 1996. This Web site was created and is maintained by John Stoner.
This project was conceived of as an information resource for the study of British history, focusing on World Wide Web resources for studying the histories of the Celtic fringe--Ireland, Scotland and Wales. It is an expansion of the first assignment for LIS 190, which was a Sampler of World Wide Web Resources for the Study of Irish History. Similar search strategies and criteria were used on this final assignment as on the first; however, given that there was no limit put on the number of resources that could be included on the latter project, a broader application of the selection criteria was used.
The purpose of this expanded project is to provide online resources for use in a senior-level college course on British history, from ancient times to the twentieth century, focusing on the role of the Celtic fringe (Ireland, Scotland and Wales) in the course of British history and the development of the British nation. The emphasis of the sources (as with the course itself) is political, while also providing cultural and anthropological background and pointers to sources for original research. It is a distillation of the results of searches conducted on a number of the major search engines, subject catalogs, and lists of links available on the Web. These searches indicated that Web sources on the history of the Celtic fringe fall into the following major categories: primary sources (archives and online documents), genealogical resources, bibliographic information, online publications, electronic discussion lists, historical case studies and specialized sites, and general sites (meta-sites).
Several criteria were utilized in evaluating the results of the various searches to determine which sites would be included in this list. Generally, institutional Web sites (especially educational institutions) were preferred to individual sites, due first to the fact that institutional sites were more likely to be permanent, and, second, that institutions could be evaluated for their partisanship or objectivity more easily than individuals. Next, sites that appeared in the results of the searches of more than one search engine were preferred to those that occurred in only one engine. Whenever possible, the broader, more inclusive sites ("meta-sites") were preferred to the more narrowly focused information sources, although the latter were included when they provided unique information. In most cases, no information older than two years was included (when this could be determined).
The following search engines were searched for Web resources for this site: Alta Vista, Inktomi, Lycos Index, Magellan, Open Text, and Yahoo.
In the case of the search engines, all were searched using the terms "British history," "Irish history," Scottish history," and "Welsh history." Where the search indicated that some form of word order and/or proximity indicators capabilities were available, they were used. So in Lycos, the "match all terms" and "strong match" options were chosen; in Alta Vista the advanced query was used, enclosing the search terms in quotation marks; and in Open Text's simple search using the "exact phrase" provided greater control than using the "followed by" option in the power search ("followed by" only requires that the second terms be within 80 characters of the first search term) so the former was used. Inktomi provided no proximity or word order control but it did provide (as did the others) a ranking system for the search results. Yahoo Search provided neither controls nor ranking and had the least number of hits (nonetheless, its hierarchical topic catalog produced more hits than its search engine and is a good basic starting place for Web resources on Celtic fringe history).
All the other engines returned more than 100 hits each. Depending on the total number found, the first 200 of each engine's results were reviewed, those looking promising being bookmarked. The bookmark file was then saved as a separate file. The links were then re-examined individually and those meeting the criteria outlined in the Introduction above were annotated.
Some general observations from the project:
This project indicated the overwhelming volume and the widely varying quality of "things Celtic" on the Web.
Genealogical resources seemed to be the dominant type of resource available for the study of the history of the Celtic fringe.
The largest number of historical Web resources were found for the Irish; next came those for the Scots; and last were the Welsh.
General or "meta-sites" were seldom exclusively historical in nature--they usually spanned history, genealogy, linguistics, politics, anthropology, music, folklore, tourism, and business.
For anyone searching the Web on this topic I would advise beginning with Yahoo's subject heading Regional:Countries followed by some of the resources listed on H-ALBION's Web site.
Return to Celtic Fringe Home Page