20.112 Humbul: The final regeneration

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 20, No. 112.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
  www.kcl.ac.uk/schools/humanities/cch/research/publications/humanist.html
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2006 12:40:43 +0100
         From: Michael Fraser <mike.fraser_at_computing-services.oxford.ac.uk>
         Subject: Humbul: The final regeneration

Dear Humanist,

After over 20 years of operation Humbul has regenerated itself once
more and, together with Artifact, is now fully assimilated into
Intute: Arts and Humanities.

Yesterday, 13 July 2006, Intute, a new free online service, was
launched in London. Intute reflects a complete overhaul and
reorganisation of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), of which
Humbul was a part. The core business of Intute, like the RDN, is to
faciliate access to the best of the Web for education and research.

Intute: Arts and Humanities is one of four subject groups in the new
Intute and results from a merging of the Humbul Humanities Hub and
Artifact. Intute: Arts and Humanities is led by Oxford University in
partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University. Intute is funded
by the JISC and Intute: Arts and Humanities also receives funding
from the AHRC.

In summary, Intute: Arts and Humanities provides:

* A single point of service with clear search and browse interfaces,
supporting interdisciplinary use across the arts and humanities (and beyond);

* The development of additional services which add value to the
database of arts and humanities resource descriptions. These
currently comprise: AHRC projects with websites; an index of notable
people; freely available peer-reviewed electronic journals; topical
presentations of online resources ('Limelight', 'On this Date' and
'Timelines'); and the North-West Film Archive database. Functionality
currently available to other subject groups will become available to
the Arts and Humanities Subject Group.

* The availability of personalisation functionality ('MyIntute' --
developed by Chris Stephens and based on the My Humbul service) which
encourages the reuse of resource descriptions from subjects within
the arts and humanities (and beyond) together with an email alerting service;

* Implementation within the arts and humanities of other Intute-wide
activities. These include: recommendations arising from the recent
report on requirements for better supporting researchers (an activity
led by Oxford); training and support (e.g. new online tutorials and
'Best of the Web' booklets for archaeology and the visual arts).

The Web address for Intute: Arts and Humanities is
http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/. If you maintain a website
which links to Humbul, Artifact or the Resource Discovery Network
then we would be grateful if you could update the links to point to
the new Intute Website. The Humbul and Artifact websites still remain
but will no longer be updated.

As part of this reorganisation we have also merged together the
humbul_at_jiscmail.ac.uk and artifact_at_jiscmail.ac.uk lists into a single
email list for announcements,
intute-artsandhumanities_at_jiscmail.ac.uk. The archives for both lists
are available, together with instructions for leaving or joining the
new list, at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/intute-artsandhumanities

We would be very pleased to receive your comments and suggestions
about Intute: Arts and Humanities. Please feel free to send feedback
via the website at http://www.intute.ac.uk/artsandhumanities/feedback.html.

Please feel free to circulate this email within your institution and
subject associations.

Best wishes,

Michael Fraser
Director, Intute: Arts and Humanities

---
For your amusement, here are some links to messages announcing
previous regenerations of Humbul:
Nov 1985, Lou Burnard plays with Humbul
(http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lou/reports/1985.htm)
Feb 1989, May Katzen summarises how to access Humbul for Humanist readers
(http://dmmc.lib.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v02/0077.html)
Oct 1991, Stuart Lee announces move of Humbul from Leicester to Oxford
(http://lists.village.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v05/0389.html)
Jul 1994, Stuart Lee anounces move and relaunch of Humbul from a
bulletin board to a Web site
(http://dmmc.lib.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v08/0101.html)
Oct 1997, Chris Stephens relaunches Humbul as a database-driven
gateway (http://dmmc.lib.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v11/0306.html)
Oct 1999, Humbul urgently seeking Systems Developer having
successfully bid to host the humanities hub of the RDN
(http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v13/0237.html)
Feb 2001, Humbul has a complete redesign, as reported in news from
the HCU (http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/lists_archive/Humanist/v14/0589.html)