Resources for Portuguese Maritime History (1200-1700)

31.12.2007

Project status

concluded

Execution period

2005-2007

REF

POCI/HAR/61862/2004

Main research unit

Centre for History of the University of Lisbon

Principal Investigator

Francisco José Rogado Contente Domingues (ULisboa)

Research team

José Manuel Henriques Varandas (ULisboa); José Virgílio Amaro Pissarra (ULisboa); Paulo David Mendes Pereira Vicente (ULisboa)

A scholar devoted to Portuguese Maritime history will face several obstacles when trying to understand the state-of-the-art of a particular subject, or even to start a research project of its own. This is the general result of a general lack of resources concerning the information on the Portuguese historiographical background, e.g., extensive analytical bibliographies on particular topics, biobliographies of scholars with relevant work, texts on methodological problems, the history of disciplines or research fields, and, last but not least, simple indexes of the collections of documents or indexes of scientific journals, which do not exist as a rule. This is due to a sort of lack of memory from the entities that are supposed to take care in first place: it is enough to remember the number of learned journals closed without proper indexes (or no indexes at all, much more frequently), or collections of books published without any sort of list of names or abstracts. An existing index does not solve all problems, however. Traditional support (e.g., books) for the necessary access to information is not always the most convenient, being the internet much faster and more easily accessed. The “internal” perspective of the organizers of indexes is also sometimes inadequate: the Anais do Clube Militar Naval, one of the oldest journals published in Portugal, with c. 130 volumes and 3 volumes of indexes, is an example because it does not reflect appropriately on the amount and quality of many of the articles published for more than a century, and it is out of print. The project’s team aims to retrieving and collecting essential information data on Portuguese Maritime history, presumably much more extensive than generally acknowledge. Information will be organised and made available through a website to facilitate a quick and responsive research tool, namely concerning: a) indexes of learned journals, including extensive references on the journal itself (editors, details of publications, dates, purposes and objectives, general presentation of the journal); b) indexes of collections of books (e.g., the collection published by MAPFRE in 1992; c) general indexes of relevant collections of documents; d) bibliographies of scholars, both Portuguese and non-Portuguese; and e) analytical bibliographies organised by sub-themes inside the general subject within the history of the subject of study.

Project webpage