Editorial

Historical Life Course Studies, a journal in population studies, aims to stimulate and facilitate the implementation of IDS (Intermediate Data Structure, a standard data format for large historical databases), and to publish the results from (comparative) research with the help of large historical databases. The journal publishes not only empirical articles, but also descriptions (of the construction) of new and existing large historical databases, as well as articles dealing with database documentation, the transformation of existing databases into the IDS format, the development of algorithms and extraction software and all other issues related to the methodology of large historical databases.