Humbul

Humbul was an online service that reviewed and catalogued websites of interest to academics and students in the humanities. It was founded as a humanities communications service in 1985. In July 2006 Humbul was merged into the Intute service, as one-half of the Intute Arts and Humanities Group.

History

After its foundation Humbul evolved into a Web-based service and, in 1999, became the Humbul Humanities Hub, part of the UK's national Resource Discovery Network(RDN). Humbul was based at Oxford University within the Research Technologies Service and received grant funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The Intute humanities staff are still based within the Research Technologies Service, although many of the management and technical decisions for the new service are now taken centrally at Mimas, part of Manchester University. The website reviews and information that Humbul catalogued have been imported wholesale into the Intute database, and many have been revised and updated.

Subject coverage

Humbul covered over thirty subject areas within the humanities, including:

* Archaeology
* Classics
* History
* Religious studies and theology
* Philosophy
* History of science and philosophy of science
* European languages, literature and culture
* Asiatic, African, American and Australasian Languages, Literature and Culture
* Manuscript studies
* Humanities computing

Humbul also developed collections of website records relating to online peer-reviewed e-journals for the humanities and also a collection of websites relating to research projects funded by the AHRC.

Functionality

The primary method of accessing Humbul's database of resource descriptions was over the World Wide Web using a standard Web browser. The online database contained over 10,000 reviews of academic websites by July 2006, which could be accessed through search and browse interfaces. Browsing by subject, for example, was possible as was restricting searches to a particular subject or type of resource.

Humbul also offered a personalisation service that included email alerting (based on saved searches or saved subject areas) and the My Humbul Include function which enabled the re-presentation of catalogue records within a personal website (using javascript technology). For each subject covered there was also a freely available RSS newsfeed which contains news of the latest websites reviewed by Humbul. It was also possible to search Humbul via Z39.50-conformant clients, such as the Endnote personal bibliographic database application. All these functions have been transferred to the new Intute system.

External links

* [http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/ Intute Arts and Humanities]
* [http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/rts/ Oxford University Research Technologies Service]
* [http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/ Arts and Humanities Research Council]
* [http://www.jisc.ac.uk/ Joint Information Systems Committee]