Now the election is over, and restrictions on press releases from the civil
service have been lifted, I can now post the following:
A Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £11,300 to the A2A Political Archives
Consortium Retrospective Conversion Project will ensure that catalogues to
some of the most important political records in England will soon be
available for online searching on the Access to Archives (A2A) web site, by
anyone in the world. By contributing them to the National Archive Network
the consortium aims to enhance the public's understanding of the UK's
political history, deliver educational benefits, and attract new users of
archives, by making these outstanding collections freely available to anyone
with access to the Internet - at home, work, college, school, or at their
local library.
Together, the archival collections concerned cover aspects of almost every
major political event and movement in Britain over the last 300 years: the
development of radical political thought and atheism in the eighteenth
century; the Luddites; the Peterloo Massacre; the 1832 Reform Act; the
anti-slavery movement; the fight for a universal franchise; the history of
India and Palestine; the Irish question; the First World War; the General
Strike; the rise of fascism before, and communism after, the Second World
War; post-war socialism; the Suez crisis; and the trade union movement in
the twentieth century. In addition, as a biographical source for the lives
of the men and women who created the records, these archives are unique and
unsurpassed.
The Political Archives Consortium is lead by the Parliamentary Archives and
comprises nine other public sector English Archives: University College
London, Cambridge University Library, Devon Record Office, the Churchill
Archives Centre, Cambridge, Warwick University Modern Records Centre,
Wiltshire and Swindon Record Office, the University of Birmingham Library
Special Collections, King's College London, and Hackney Archives Service.
The contributing institutions are offering to the site catalogues to the
archives of the Prime Ministers Robert Walpole, David Lloyd-George, Andrew
Bonar-Law, Stanley Baldwin, Anthony Eden and Henry Addington; as well as
those of the statesmen Randolph Churchill, Hugh Gaitskell, Ernest Bevin and
Richard Crossman; and political thinkers including Jeremy Bentham, George
Orwell, Charles Bradlaugh and Arthur Bryant. Other catalogues relate to the
collections of cabinet ministers, MPs, policy advisers and diplomats.
The Political Archives Consortium project is just one of many groups
contributing data to A2A, the English strand of the UK archives network.
The A2A programme will provide free access to 8 million catalogue entries
for archives dating from the twelfth to the twentieth centuries and held in
national, local and specialist archives available on the World Wide Web by
March 2002. The A2A programme is led by the Public Record Office, the
Historical Manuscripts Commission and the British Library.
|