The Poor Law Records were recorded in Application and Report Books (ARBs), sixteen of which are stored in the Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS), offering a varied spatial and temporal coverage.

The books have been collected by an HHB thesis-writer and are now part of the HHB storage. They provide data about around 4000 households (7000 observations, since the same households often recur over time) and 17000 individuals.

HHB is pleased to announce that the online archive of the project will be soon available.

The new online repository will soon be ready, with currently more than 50 GBs of PDFs ready for display; thanks to a new scanner we will soon be able to digitize quickly all the valuable archival sources stored in the HHB archive. A SFTP server for the storage of source files is now complete: PDFs will be stored gradually in the next few months.

HHB is pleased to announce that the digitalization and harmonization of the Bank of Italy's Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) has now officially begun.

The HHB team has started digitizing the first wave of the Bank of Italy's historical archive, documenting through microdata the living conditions of the Italian population since 1977.

The UAS (Ufficio Assistenza Sociale — “Social Assistance Office”) of the Governatorate of Rome is increasingly proving to be a real gold mine of historical sources documenting the living conditions of the population of Rome in the interwar years. 

The HHB team is working on a new source, which collects applications of 100 families for a social housing program, specifically targeted for large families. The source not only provides detailed information about the economic and health condition of the family members, but also rich photographic evidence.

New projects and new challenges for HHB.

On the wake of projects as the Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations (HISCO) and the Historical International Social Class Scheme (HISCLASS) – carried out by researchers from the University of Leuven – the HHB team is now working on a brand new project: a Historical Classification Of Individual Consumption by Purpose (HIST-COICOP).