Social History Curators' Group

firstBASE goes live

SHCG is very pleased to announce that the all new firstBASE is now live!  Take a look at www.shcg.org.uk/firstbase

Thanks to funding from the Museums Association Esmee Fairbairn Collections Fund, firstBASE is now bigger, better, easier to use, search and add to.  Users can now add their own suggestions of useful resources to the site and comment on ones they’ve used too.

firstBASE holds records, weblinks and signposts to a wealth of resources (books, articles, websites, significant collections, museums and organisations) that can help everyone working with social and local history collections develop their interpretation, and improve their identification, of objects. 

firstBASE can be your first point of call when given an exhibition title to research, or when a public enquiry or object identification presents itself and you have no idea where to start - it shows the useful resources you could use, the key reference books you could read.  firstBASE’s USP is that all resources on it are peer reviewed by its Editorial Committee, so in contrast with only using ‘google’ or other search engines for research, you can be sure that the resources listed on firstBASE are accurate and of a high quality.

More information will follow in the next edition of SHCG News, but in the meantime, have a look, and please start adding and commenting!