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Dear Colleagues: I am posting this on behalf of an academic colleague who is putting in a bid for funding to develop an electronic archive of UK postcards, 1902-1910. She would welcome hearing from anyone who has relevant experience and who might be able to offer some practical advice. Please reply to Dr Gillen directly at [log in to unmask] Many thanks. Details of the project are as follows: "I am preparing a bid to the AHRB concerning the analysis of vernacular writing in 1902 - 1910 as appearing on UK postcards. A by product of the research (also can be viewed as part of the research process, but not the primary objective of the project) is the creation of an archive, possibly either web or CD-Rom/DVD based. This would be produced by scanning both sides of the postcard. The writing would be 'converted' to text which would be subject to analysis. The archive would ideally contain facsimilies of both sides of the postcards. Very likely, (having seen other projects e.g. of 19th century writing at the University of Pittsburgh) the texts would be fully searchable. Indeed, if they were this would mean we as researchers could carry out our concordance exercises. Do you have any ideas/experiences of this kind of work. We need to have some idea of what is involved e.g. the software required and indeed equipment (beyond the obvious of scanner, pc etc obviously)." Dr Julia Gillen Senior Research Fellow Institute of Education and Centre for Human Communication Manchester Metropolitan University Manchester M20 2RR England Tel (0) 161 247 2411 http://www.mmu.ac.uk/ioe/research/staff/JGillen.htm