Previous Messages from the President of the AFIHR |
May 2010 |
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President's 2010 Report to the MembershipSears McGee |
In my last report, I mentioned that one of the new projects we helped to fund at our Louisville meeting was the digitizing of Foster’s Alumni Oxoniensis, and I am now pleased to report that the IHR staff has begun the process of putting Foster on the British History Online website. As it happens, I suggested that Foster and Venn’s volumes be added to BHO when I was visiting the IHR in summer 2008, so I’m particularly pleased about this development. If any of you have suggestions about other reference materials that would be good to have online, please let me know. I’ll be happy to pass along any suggestions I receive to the appropriate staff members in London. |
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December 2009 |
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President's 2009 Message to the MembershipSears McGee
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The AFIHR board met during the NACBS conference in Louisville early in November. Once again, we are grateful to your contributions which enabled us to make grants of $16,400 to underwrite important parts of the IHR’s program. The board approved a grant to help graduate students from North America to participate in the History Lab conference on “Spaces and Places” from June 26-29 at the IHR. This is part of our endeavor to acquaint a new generation of graduate students with the IHR library, its seminars, and its facilities supporting historical research. Let me encourage those of you who know or teach graduate students to consider applying for a grant by going to the IHR website and examining under “Study and Training” the plans for History Lab’s June conference. Our $16,400 allocation is to be devoted to the History Lab conference for graduate students ($2,000), the digitization and addition to British History Online (BHO) of Foster’s Alumni Oxoniensis ($6,000), and the IHR library purchasing fund ($8,400). The new director of the IHR, Miles Taylor, has just completed his first year, and we enjoyed hearing from him about the progress of numerous initiatives that are under way. Readers of this report may recall that last year we began an effort to address the problem of access to digital historical sources on-line for those members of our profession who teach at institutions whose libraries cannot afford the subscriptions that must be paid to provide access to these vital materials. Thanks to generous cooperation from the IHR staff in London, we announced at least a partial solution at this time last year. AFIHR members can, for an additional $30 (on top of the $45 annual membership) have access to the “premium content” of BHO. We also created a new membership category for graduate students; they may join us for $30 annually. Please note that the BHO access is provided on a calendar year basis beginning January 1. Among other perks, subscribers to this option can make keyword searches of most of the Calendars of State Papers. Funds generated in this way will be spent on expanding the range and variety of digitized sources for British history. Further details about how all this operates are available on the AFIHR and IHR websites. We are pleased that approximately fifty of our members have opted to make use of this benefit and hope that more will do so. We especially hope that our efforts to reach younger scholars with news of this option will bear fruit. One of my own graduate students has recently presented in my seminar a terrific dissertation chapter on the transmission and “spinning” of “news” in the late 1640s and early 1650s which relied heavily on exploitation of this keyword search. |
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December 2008 |
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President's 2008/09 Message to the MembershipSears McGee
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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. |
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April 2008 |
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President's 2007/08 Message to the MembershipSears McGee
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As you may recall from my letter of last December, your contributions enabled us to make grants to the IHR of approximately $16,000. The money funded important acquisitions for the library, as always, and bursaries to help graduate students from North America to attend the summer History Lab conference on the theme of "Turning Points" (June 26-27). The academic year which is now ending has proved a time of transition at the IHR, in that David Bates stepped down as director on March 14 in order to take up a new post as Professor of Medieval History at the University of East Anglia. He will spend the coming year preparing to give the Ford Lectures in 2010. He worked hard and effectively during his years at the helm of the IHR, and we are most grateful to him for his excellent service to our profession. The Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Metropolitan History, Derek Keene, is serving as Acting Director until the new Director, Prof. Miles Taylor, takes over in the autumn. An important problem that we have been trying to address is that of access to digital historical sources on-line for those members of our profession who teach at institutions whose libraries cannot afford the subscriptions that must be paid to provide access to these vital materials. I will be discussing a possible solution or at least partial solution with IHR staff members when I am in London in July and very much hope to be able to make an announcement about it later this year. 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 annual meeting of the Board of Directors of American Friends of the IHR was held in October 2008 in Cincinnati. Our next meet will be held in Louisville, KY on November 6-8, 2009. Sincerely yours, |
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April 2007 |
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President's 2006/07 Report to the MembershipSears McGee
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I write to report on the decisions made at the AFIHR board meeting in Boston in November. Thanks to your continuing generosity, we made grants totaling almost $11,000. These included adding important works to the library's holdings: the collected works of Florence Nightingale; six volumes of publications by and for the London Corresponding Society (1792-99); the 1872 edition of the Cartulaire de l'abbaye royale de Notre-Dames des Chatelliers; the trials for treason and sedition from 1692-94 (five volumes); and the coalition diaries and letters of H. A. L. Fisher (four volumes, 1916-22). We funded the purchase of a portable data projector and three computers for the use of postgraduates working in the IHR. And, after hearing an engaging presentation from Liza Filby about the History Lab's annual conference for graduate students, we made a grant of $2000 to support bursaries to help students from North America to participate in this year's conference on "Generations." At the latest report, four students (one each from Princeton, Drew, Stanford, and Columbia) are beneficiaries and will be presenting papers at the conference on 25-26 June at the IHR. The History Lab was established in 2005 with the goal of creating "a social and intellectual forum for the postgraduate community" based at the IHR. We were delighted that we could help broaden its reach to include more students from abroad who will learn to value the IHR as a base for their activities when in the UK. 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. Sincerely yours, |
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November 2003 |
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President's 2003 Report to the MembershipDaniel A. Baugh |
The American Friends of the IHR (AFIHR) was founded to help the Institute by providing funds for particular projects - most recently, the trustees decided their Baltimore meeting of November 9, 2002 decided that the funds raised in the current appeal, 2002-03, would be applied to the purchase of Palmer's Full Text Online version of the (London) Times, covering the period 1785-1870. At that meeting the trustees also voted unanimously to name Prof. Jacob M. Price "Founding President of the American Friends of the Institute of Historical Research" in recognition of his role in creating the organization and in guiding it during its first eleven years. We are always eager to enlist new members -- just fill out and mail in the contribution form. Individual contributions made through the American Friends are U.S. tax-deductible, and the AFIHR is also eligible to receive funds from charitable foundations. Checks of $45 or more should be sent to Prof. Nancy Ellenberger, History Department, U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, MD 21402-5044. American Friends enjoy the privileges of individual IHR membership, including full access to Institute facilities in London, and a discount on all IHR publications. All officers and trustees of the AFIHR serve voluntarily, with compensation only for administrative expences, ensuring that almost every dollar is forwarded to an Institute project. Thank you for your support of the Institute.
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Tax deductible contribution form for American Friends of the Institute of Historical Research
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