It was the result of many visits abroad, particularly to western Europe, that triggered this year's change of name to History. The use of acronyms is very much de rigeur when applying for funding in the UK and the EU, but causes much confusion to the wider community in higher education and elsewhere. History, Histoire or Geschichte is much clearer to all. The service History has a choice of all three languages to lead those interested in history through most of its higher level menus, thus serving those countries with the largest number of Internet hosts in Europe. Further languages will be added as interest and time dictates.
Language is a major problem for historians on the Internet.
Beautiful maps of Venice, for example, from the State Archives but put up by the Institute of Architecture in Venice will not be found generally by searching for Venice or Venedig. History along with about twenty of its European friends applied for a multi-million EU funding project to establish a European network using a common concordance, much along the lines of a similar project that Venetian academic architects are involved in, but for the whole of East and Western Europe. This passed its initial review, but seems to have failed at the final fence. Demonstrations in the UK and around many other parts of the EU made it clear that a new structure was required for History and this is a major aspect of the relaunch of the service. To be user friendly across sectors within the UK and across countries in the EU, servers and gateways need to be as simple as possible, so that they attract maximum use.