ABSTRACT
Richard Trainor has claimed that historians on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly realising that ‘information technology will enable students to learn about the past in deeper and more complex ways’ (Trainor 1990: 146). In particular a database management system (DBMS), the program which allows you to build and operate a database, is an ideal tool for organising, managing and interrogating historical information. For most history students databases may be a relatively new experience, and indeed their application to the history curriculum is still in its infancy. However, as historical information is increasingly becoming available in machine-readable form, historians will want to acquire the means of effectively using it, and therefore they need an understanding of a DBMS (Lloyd-Jones and Lewis 1994b: 42).
