This public search page is for looking at the catalogue of documents and other artefacts (e.g., photographs, recordings, etc.) that are held in the Sussex Harvard Information Bank (SHIB). The catalogue is still being collated with only a proportion of the holdings currently included. For the purposes of developing this database, only part of the catalogue has been uploaded here.
This page allows for searching in the Title field only. It will return only items with a SHIB code in the keywords field of each catalogue entry. A brief explanation of catalogue coding is given at the bottom of the page.
Approved guests can use the Catalogue search returning title and author(s).
HSP Associates can also use the Catalogue search within all fields page.
Total Records Found: 0, showing 100 per page
A guide to the data structure is in preparation, but the basic format is relatively easy to pick up.
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. A search for OPCW in the title field will bring up every document that has the 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 that became SHIB. Not all holdings are yet catalogued in an accessible form and this work is ongoing, especially for the Robinson collection.
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) 12 May 2026