Information requirements and data description in historical social research: a proposal

Abstract

Description and documentation is one of the major prerequisites for disseminating and exchanging machine-readable historical sources and data. This proposal for description and documentation items is an attempt for standardizing information requirements in historical research; it does not give recommendations for all possible description and documentation needs, but instead attempts to set essential parameters for describing and documenting machine-readable historical sources and data. In the appendix to this proposal, an example using the 1851 Census of England and Wales is given to provide a detailed illustration of the proposal.