On 28 October 2023, the British Library was subject to a major cyberattack, entailing a near complete shutdown of the Library's web-based services. Staff at the British Library are continuing to work extremely hard to restore services. As this continues, a number of organisations are offering guidance on short-term alternatives and workarounds while BL databases remain unavailable for research or teaching across the UK and overseas. This post provides a summary of these alternatives and a selection of guides now available, with a special focus on those working historically. We also invite further proposals for alternative resources to add to this listing.

RHS Workshop Grants support meetings of historians to undertake a wide range of projects, from research, to debate, programme planning and networking. The first round of RHS Workshops took place in 2023. They include a day event recently hosted by the Early Modern Migration Reading Group on the subject of 'Beyond the "Good"/"Bad" Migrant Dichotomy: Ways Forward for Early Modern and Contemporary History'. In this post, the organisers of this Workshop -- Kathleen Commons, Dan Rafiqi, Juliet Atkinson, and Samantha Sint Nicolaas -- reflect on their project.

What was daily life like for old people in Russian villages at the turn of the twentieth century? In this post, Sarah Badcock (University of Nottingham) considers the lives of non-able elderly people in late Imperial Russia; drawing on accounts of real lives and representations of old age in art and literature. This post introduces and accompanies Sarah's research article, 'Waiting to Die? Old Age in the Late Imperial Russian Village', which was recently published Open Access on FirstView for 'Transactions of the Royal Historical Society'.