This is the gateway to the Working Page that is the focal point to collate progress in preserving the legacy of Julian Perry Robinson, modernizing the rich collection of resources he managed — the Sussex Harvard Information Bank (SHIB) — and reinvigorating the Harvard Sussex Program (HSP). As a work in progress, it is designed for use by project members in preparation for the planned public site.
There are a number of resources listed lower down this page that are available without an account in order to illustrate the scope of work of the project and to provide useful tools for gaining information from the catalogue.
The legacy HSP website is at http://hsp.sussex.ac.uk which will be replaced by a new site based on this project.
Initial funding for conservation, cataloguing and digitization of materials such as Julian’s extensive publications including his Syria chronologies has been gratefully received from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Other donations have been received through the Julian Perry Robinson Fund established in his memory by the University of Sussex for which all those who admired and respected Julian’s work are grateful.
As the project develops, additional categories of logins have been created to allow wider use of these resources. As managing the account system will be resource intensive, only a few guests are being approved at a time to allow resources to be focused on developing the catalogue and the website for the time being. Additional financial support is being sought.
Resources available without an account include:
- A listing of documents added in the past seven days
- Sample search capabilities
- Source documentation listings
- A basic guide to the data format
These have been selected to illustrate the scope of the holdings together with the utility of the document handling system and can be found by scrolling down this page.
Seven-day listing
A simple option is to look at a selection of documents. The list below shows documents added in the past seven days but only shows the title and author fields of three results at a time to inhibit misuse. These documents are listed with the most recent publications first.
Total Records Found: 87, showing 3 per page
Sample search
As an example of the work being done, sample basic searches of the document catalogue by title or author can be done below without logging in. Not all documents have yet been catalogued and the full search capabilities will include being able to search the keyword/taxonomy data, some of which can already be done by users who are logged in. This sample search system will return only three results at a time to inhibit misuse and delivers results starting with the oldest.
Total Records Found: 0, showing 3 per page
Source documentation listing
Another option is to look at a selection of documents. Public pages created to list particular sets of documentary sources include:
- Documents from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)
- Documents from the Working Group established under the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC)
Basic guide to the data format
A guide to the data structure is in preparation, but the basic format is relatively easy to pick up.
The author field should be self-explanatory.
A simple example of a return from a title field is “1984-0331 [Gua] Baghdad plans big nerve gas offensive”. At the basic level, the title field contains three main elements — a date code, a source code and the document title. The date code is in the form 1984-0331 which represents 31 March 1984. Source codes are bracketed so that [Gua] represents the Guardian (London), [HSP] represents the Harvard Sussex Program, etc. Government and Parliamentary papers use different brackets for the initial code so that {CA} represents Canada, {UK} represents the United Kingdom, etc; these country codes are mostly based on the ISO-3166-2 list (or two-letter internet domain). The source codes can have more than one entry that defines the forum where something is published. For example, a Thai presentation to an OPCW policy making organ would include {TH} [OPCW] in the source code or a Philippines contribution to a BWC meeting would include {PH} [BWC]. This allows for some useful distinctions to be made, particularly through the use of square brackets [] and curly brackets {}. A search for OPCW in the title field will bring up every document title that has that string of letters in it. However, searching for {OPCW} will return documents from the Organization as a whole while [OPCW] will return documents presented by others in the context of the OPCW.
Example searches that might be carried out to help learn the indexing system include:
- 1984-0307 in the title field — brings up the records of things published on 7 March 1984
- 2025-06 in the title field — brings up the records of things published during June 2025
- [HSP] in the title field — brings up the records of things published by the Harvard Sussex Program
- BWC-MSP-2024 in the title field — brings up the records of official documents from the 2024 BWC Meeting of States Parties
Returns come from the catalogue entries from the collections put together by Julian Perry Robinson and by Richard Guthrie. Not all holdings are yet catalogued in an accessible form and this work is ongoing, especially for the Robinson collection. As an experiment from the middle of 2025, a selection of documents have had weblinks added to the original sources to assess what the usefulness and resource implications might be.
Two key points worth noting: (1) the inclusion of any document or other resource in this dataset does not imply any endorsement, simply a recognition that it has some relevance to the debates on particular issues but this might include inadvertent or deliberate inaccurate information; (2) while it would be interesting to generate a search system that produced direct links to copies of documents that are not freely available online, it is not possible to reproduce documents that are under copyright without a clear “fair-use” justification.
Last updated (RG) 6 October 2025