Just a brief word today, to keep you informed about the changes occurring to the History SPOT platform.  These won’t affect your ability to visit the site, either for the podcasts or our research training material, but you will find some changes to the way you navigate the site.

One of the main things that we are trying to do in making these changes is to link it more closely to our parent site, the IHR website (www.history.ac.uk).  You can now access History SPOT either through its home page or through the relevant sections of the IHR website.  For example to access the podcasts you can come in via the seminar pages on the IHR website or from the History SPOT front page.  Detailed information about each training course will now be held on the IHR website where you can then log in to History SPOT to reach those materials.

So, to the changes we have made today.  Firstly you will notice some changes to the History SPOT front page.  We’re now using this space as a place to read about the latest news regarding the IHR’s online seminars and training provision.  Thus we have a latest podcasts feed, latest blog posts, and links to all of our research training online.

The main toolbar has also been simplified to grant easier access to the contents of the site.  The side navigation bar still remains in a reduced form but will be replaced shortly.  You will notice that the Collaborative portion of the site has vanished.  We haven’t gotten rid of this, but we are in the process of changing how we use this portion of the site – more on that at a later date.

The other element of History SPOT that has been improved is the podcast index page.  We have worked hard to provide an index that underlies all of the podcasts on History SPOT.  You can still access these podcasts via a list of the seminar groups but now you can also search via period, geographical location, and type of history.  The search engine at the top of the page also allows you to search by keyword.  In addition we’ve moved our live stream system directly on to the seminar page, so you can now pop-out all of the live stream elements whenever you want to watch a variety of past events (or live events when they are on).

Finally, just a quick note that podcasts from this year’s seminars will begin to appear from next Monday (15 October 2012), so please do watch this space!