Historians representing several research specialties met at Rutgers University on December 12 and 13 to plan the expansion of a computer-based data bank dedicated to research on the medieval and early modern periods. The meeting was jointly sponsored by The Research Libraries Group, a corporation owned by major universities and research institutions which promotes, develops, and operates cooperative programs in collection development and shared access to research materials; and by Rutgers University.
The Data Bank was originally founded in 1982 by Peter Spufford, University Lecturer and Director of Historical Studies, Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, England; by Rudolph Bell, Professor of History at Rutgers; and by Martha Howell, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers; it is directed by Professors Bell and Howell. The Bank’s principal data set consists of some 20,000 currency quotations from the Middle Ages, which were donated by Dr. Spufford. These data, along with smaller sets of price and wage data and demographic statistics, represent the core of a data base for which Professors Bell and Howell have developed hard ware and software systems enabling scholars to use these data easily, cheaply, and productively.
The Bank is still in the planning stage and long-term funding for the project has yet to be arranged, but the principal functions of the Bank have been agreed upon. The Bank will acquire data sets of use in research on the medieval and early modern periods and rr1ake the data available to scholars in machine readable and in report form. In addition to currency, price and wage, and demographic data, we anticipate collecting most kinds of information about the period that can be rendered numerically. The Bank will also assist researchers with the development of new data sets in machine-readable form.
Although it will be several months before specific plans for the Bank have been worked out, it was the strong consensus of the meeting that the Bank should conduct a preliminary survey of the scholarly community to ascertain the number and kind of data sets that potentially might be submitted to the Bank. Scholars who have completed or have studies under way of any aspect of medieval or early modern history that has generated quantifiable data suitable for inclusion in the Bank are asked to send a short description of their projects, along with a sample of the data if possible, to the Bank’s codirectors, Professors Bell and Howell at The Department of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.
