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The purpose of this paper is to discuss the importance of documentation for digital humanities resources. This includes technical documentation of textual markup or database construction, and procedural documentation about resource construction.

A case study is presented of an attempt to reuse electronic text to create a digital library for humanities users, as part of the UCIS project. The results of qualitative research by the LAIRAH study on provision of procedural documentation are discussed, as also is, user perception of the purpose, construction and usability of resources collected using semi‐structured interviews and user workshops.

In the absence of technical documentation, it was impossible to reuse text files with inconsistent markup (COCOA and XML) in a Digital Library. Also, although users require procedural documentation, about the status and completeness of sources, and selection methods, this is often difficult to locate.

Creators of digital humanities resources should provide both technical and procedural documentation and make it easy to find, ideally from the project web site. To ensure that documentation is provided, research councils could make documentation a project deliverable. This will be even more vital once the AHDS is no longer funded to help ensure good practice in digital resource creation.

Previous work has argued that documentation is important. However, the paper presents actual evidence of the problems caused by a lack of documentation and shows that this makes reuse of digital resources almost impossible. This is intended to persuade project creators who wish resources to be reused to provide documentation about its contents and technical specifications.

As a prelude to the FLIGHT International Business and Light Aircraft Show, at Cranfield in September, C.S.E. Aviation Services Ltd. arranged a special presentation in London, mainly, to express concern about pilot and maintenance engineer shortage and a predicted worsening situation for the '80's. Rex Smith, Deputy Chairman and Managing Director, however, before introducing Jack Nicholl. Principal of the Air Training School and Jeremy Smith, Piper sales manager, gave prominence to three major news items and also reported on the continuing high level of light aircraft sales.

How do we make sense of urban life in the past? What do we do when we study urban history, and to what extent do our methods fully capture the complexities of historical city living? These are crucial questions for any scholar interested in the historical dimensions of urban experience. Notwithstanding the interest of most urban historians in the relationship between the physical form of urban space and its experience by inhabitants and visitors, very few scholars have written histories that systematically integrate these two areas of inquiry. In this chapter, we argue that such research requires a method and an accompanying tool that can analyze historical urban life in a more integrated, holistic way. We propose a way forward by introducing the Time Machine platform as a scalable data visualization and analysis tool for researching everyday urban experience across space and time. To illustrate the potential we focus on a case study: the area of the Bloemstraat in early modern Amsterdam. Unpacking a section of the Bloemstraat, house by house and room by room, we show how the Time Machine forms an instrument to connect spatial layouts to the arrangement of objects and to the practical and social use of the space by the inhabitants and visitors. We also sketch how this tool illuminates more dynamic spatial and temporal practices such as how people, goods, and activities are connected to locations in the wider city and beyond.

Things seem to be going desperately wrong with the concept of the “brave new world” predicted by the starry‐eyed optimists after the Second World War finally came to an end. To those who listen only to what they want to hear, see everything, not as it is, but as they would like it to be, a new society could be initiated and the lusty infant would emerge as a paragon for all the world to follow. The new society in truth never really got off the ground the biggest mistake of all was to cushion millions of people against the results of their own folly; to shelter them from the blasts of the ensuing economic climate. The sheltered ones were not necessarily the ordinary mass of people; many in fact were the victims and suffered the consequences. And now that the state has reached a massive crescendo, many are suffering profoundly. The big nationalised industries and vast services, such as the national health service, education, where losses in the case of the first are met by Government millions, requests to trim the extravagant spending is akin to sacrilege in the latter, have removed such terms as thrift, careful spending, value for money from the vocabulary.

The following is an introductory profile of the fastest growing firms over the three-year period of the study listed by corporate reputation ranking order. The business activities in which the firms are engaged are outlined to provide background information for the reader.

History teaching in a multi‐cultural society was one of the most frequently discussed topics in educational circles in 1990. Anybody who learned history in the pre‐1960 period would, however, have been surprised to learn that it was thought that “multi‐cultural society” was a new‐thing in the UK. To them the history of these islands seemed to be one wave of invaders after another with a sort of English only established as a universal language some 400 years ago. This strand in our history was matched by another in which brave Britons went off in search of fame and fortune, or to head off a foreign threat, overseas.

The use of accounting to help apply the principles of scientific management to business affairs is associated with the adoption of standard costing and budgetary control. This first British industry‐based study of the implementation of these calculative techniques makes use of the case study research tool to interrogate archival data relating to leading iron and steel companies. We demonstrate the adoption of standard costing and budgetary control early on (during the inter‐war period) by a single economic unit, United Steel Companies Ltd, where innovation is attributed to the engineering and scientific background and US experiences of key personnel. Elsewhere, significant management accounting change occurred only with the collapse in iron and steel corporate profitability that began to become apparent in the late 1950s. The process of accounting change is addressed and the significance for our study of the notions of evolution and historical discontinuity is examined. The paper is contextualised through an assessment of initiatives from industry‐based regulatory bodies and consideration of the economic circumstances and business conditions within which management accounting practices were the subject of radical revision.