About This Site

• Access and structure
• Site history
• Contact us
• Copyright and disclaimer

This site is intended to be standards-compliant and should give acceptable results in most current browsers, including Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Internet Explorer (release 6 or above) and Safari.  Users of older and significantly non-compliant browsers such as Netscape 4.x will inevitably experience some display problems, and are strongly urged to upgrade. 

We recommend a display size of 800x600 pixels or greater. 

Because the site is developed and maintained through volunteer effort, we cannot provide regular or detailed testing.  Reports of dead links, display problems etc are welcome and should be sent to the Website Editor (contact details below.)

The majority of this site was built using the free open-source content management system Typo3.  The News and Events guide, List of Theses and various other searchable-database elements were coded by James Sumner in PHP. 

In addition to the main navigation bar (page left) and breadcrumb trail (top), the site is navigable via an advanced search facility and complete site map.

The Society's first web presence was developed from 1997 by Dr Jon Agar, and initially resided on the web server of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester.  Early versions of the site included directions for joining the Society, publication details, links to relevant sites and information for teachers developed by the Education Section.  The domain name www.bshs.org.uk was registered in 2000, initially as a gateway to the existing material. 

Responsibility for the site passed in 2001 to Dr Sam Alberti and the following year to Dr James Sumner, who redesigned and expanded the site under its independent domain.  The site has been hosted by Binasys Ltd since 2002.  In this period the List of Theses was relaunched as a web publication and the News and Events guide was first introduced. 

The role of BSHS Web Officer was initially an Advisory Officer's post which was usually held by a member of the Council of the Society.  In Summer 2005 the role was re-designated Website Editor and the holder sits on the Communications Co-ordination Committee. 

In November 2005 the site was relaunched with a new appearance and substantially revised information under a content management system, providing a clearer site structure and flexible searchability. 

The site has been archived by the British Library-backed UK Web Archiving Consortium since September 2005; copies of some older versions of the site are known to exist at archive.org.  (Note: the BSHS cannot accept responsibility for material archived by external sites.)

Comments about site structure or policy are welcome and will normally be dealt with by the Website Editor.  The address to write to is web@bshs.org.uk. 

Please note that this is not the correct contact for queries about site content or the work discussed on this site, which will be dealt with by those responsible.  See Contacts for more details. 

The copyright notice and disclaimer both apply to the site as a whole.