ANNUAL APPEAL to benefit the Institute of Historical Research

From the Membership Secretary

Prof. Nancy W. Ellenberger
Department of History
U. S. Naval Academy
Annapolis, MD 21402-5044

• Please consider making an annual tax-deductible (U.S.A.) contribution for the benefit of the Institute of Historical Research.

• A contribution of $45.00 or more provides standing as a regular individual member of the Institute to U.S.-resident donors. And, as an option open only to American Friends of the IHR, for an additional $30.00, members may opt to have full access to the rich array of resources of the IHR's British History Online (as explained on the contribution form).

• Checks and forms should be returned to Prof. Ellenberger (use address on tax deductible contribution form) in order to maintain an updated list of contributors and addresses (checks will be sent on to our treasurer).

From the President of the AFIHR

President's Report to the Membership

December 2008

Sears McGee
President, AFIHR,
Department of History,
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410

Previous Reports

The AFIHR board met during the NACBS conference in Cincinnati early last month. The new Director of the IHR, Professor Miles Taylor, opened our meeting with an excellent sketch of his ambitious and exciting plans and ideas for the future. Thanks to your continuing generosity, we were able to allocate funds to help support important programs and library acquisitions. We devoted $2,500 to bursaries to help North American graduate students attend the IHR's summer History Lab conference in 2009; last year's grant for this purpose supported participation by three graduate students in the 2008 meeting. We granted $5,000 to the library (for the purchase of Macaulay's journals, Harriet Martineau's collected letters, the African American national biography, and a contribution to the cost of obtaining access to the digitized version of the 17th and 18th century Burney newspapers). The remaining $4,600 will support implementation of Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) in the Royal Historical Bibliography of British and Irish History. This will enable users to register searches in their areas of interest which will receive automatic e-mail updates as new items are added to the Bibliography. This is a version of SDI which we can all heartily welcome.

Our board also approved a new option for AFIHR members to receive for $30 (a substantial discount) a year's remote access to British History Online's “premium content” which makes the 800 volumes that have been digitized fully cross-searchable. These include the Journals of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, the Statutes of the Realm, the Victoria County History, and most of the Calendars of State Papers. It is expected that the remaining CSP volumes will become available during the next twelve months, along with the Calendars of the Close Rolls and the Parliament Rolls of Medieval England. Income from charges for the “premium content” will be used to publish further free content. It should be noted that one's access codes will be good for each calendar year beginning January 1, regardless of the date of joining or re-joining the AFIHR. I am most grateful to David Bates, Miles Taylor, Jane Winters, Michelle Waterman, Mira Chotaliya, Emily Morrell and others at the IHR for consulting with me via e-mail and meeting with me when I have been in London to discuss this attractive idea and figure out how to turn it into a reality. I am also grateful for the enthusiasm my fellow board members displayed when I first proposed it over a year ago and delighted that we are now in a position to move ahead. We hope that this option will be a boon for scholars who work at institutions whose libraries cannot afford access to the online resources that those of us who work for research universities enjoy.

Please renew your membership in the AFIHR so we can continue to support the work of the IHR from this side of the Atlantic. More information is available elsewhere on this website, and we remain grateful to Newton Key for his excellent work as our webmaster. A contribution $45 or more annually to the American Friends of the IHR confers membership in the Institute and facilitates the creation or updating of a personal "swipe" card at the reception desk. All officers and board members of the AFIHR serve without compensation. Administrative costs are minimal, consisting of mailing expenses, occasional technical services, and accounting fees. Therefore nearly every dollar contributed is forwarded to the Institute in order to help pay for some aspect of its work. As you may observe on the stub below, checks are to be sent to Professor Nancy Ellenberger, so that she can keep our membership list up to date. She will forward all checks to our treasurer, Bill Lubenow. Thank you for your past support.

Our next board meeting will be held on Friday, 6 November, 8 - 11 am in the Saratoga Room, Hyatt Regency Louisville, 320 W. Jefferson Street, Louisville, KY.

Sincerely yours,

Sears McGee