An extensive relational database, developed for both teaching and research purposes over a period of some 25 years by Professor Stuart Ball and Dr Graham Smith in the History department at Leicester University, at first on an Ingres system and since 2001 on SQL Server. Its core is a near-comprehensive digital version of the standard compilation of British election results published by F. W. S. Craig. The transcription aims to be virtually complete, covering all general elections and by-elections with the exception only of Irish and university seats, and including full candidate details for each contest as well as the party results. The database began as part of the department's pioneering Computing for Historians programme, which from 1989 onwards introduced Leicester History undergraduates to digital research methods through a mandatory database element in the degree structure. In this context it proved to be a versatile basis for more than 120 student finals projects. As a research database it was significantly enhanced from 2008 with our development of a system for correlating parliamentary constituencies with the different geographical units used by the census (England and Wales) and hence constructing socio-economic constituency profiles, so opening up a line of research from which historians have in the past been deterred by the difficulty of mapping constituencies on to census areas. This innovative approach provided the basis for the electoral analyses in Professor Ball's award-winning book Portrait of a Party: The Conservative Party in Britain 1918-1945 (Oxford UP, 2013), making the database an important resource for anyone wishing to replicate or extend that research.<br>

The database was developed in the first instance as a resource for undergraduate teaching and subsequently for historical and genealogical research. The teaching aspect was in the context of the pioneering Computing for Historians programme developed at Leicester between 1988 and 2002. This required all history students to undertake database work as a core element in their degree, involving an assigned quota of data input into one of a range of departmental databases and culminating in a finals project on their designated database. From a research point of view, work on the Shelter database received an important stimulus with the discovery that a substantial proportion of the migrants recorded in the database were bound for South Africa. This discovery attracted funding from the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town, to help speed up the input by employing three postgraduates, and it led to the mounting of a partial online version of the database in Cape Town as part of a project there to research the development of South Africa’s early Jewish community at the beginning of the twentieth century. The database has subsequently been drawn on by two postgraduate theses and a number of publications.<br>