IT and the Historian: Week 4: constructing your own bibliography using BIDS

The first thing you should do is to save this lesson as a Bookmark. Then you can always go back to it easily. You can also print it out at any printer station.


This week's lesson is intended to build on last week's exercise. Last week, hopefully, you should have learned how to copy and paste references from on-line library catalogues into Microsoft Word or Wordpad. This week you will do much the same thing, only the idea is to build up a bibliography of articles taken from BIDS.

What is BIDS? BIDS stands for Bath Information & Data Services. It is essentially a service providing bibliographical information from a number of easily searched databases. The UCS here provides an icon which takes you directly to BIDS. In this lesson, however, you will use the direct Web link.

The new BIDS link is easy to use, so easy that really you can follow the onscreen instructions. A number of pointers are needed, however. You also need a password and an identifier.
I will e-mail your course leaders the history department identifier and password for BIDS. You should first of all follow the on screen instructions and register yourself to create your own personal login name and password for BIDS.


The following is the address of the BIDS service.

You can enter BIDS directly from here.


This week's assessed work is to produce a fifteen plus bibliography of articles concerning a topic related to one of the lectures in Historical Perspectives and Techniques. Please hand them to a course leader by next Thursday. Print them out at a printer station, or send them as an e-mail message. Given the volume of mail this generates, printed bibliographies might be better. Higher marks may be awarded for bibliographies formatted and edited in Word for windows. Good luck.


Bids Home Page, includes downloadable guides.

BIDSHELP@bids.ac.uk