Welcome to Pam White and Mary McIntyre who have joined this week, and welcome back to Pat McCabe, to whom thanks for posting "Names of Five Merchant Mariners, born Buteshire, voyage 1870" earlier this week. If you haven't already contributed, we hope to hear from you soon. ****** ****** ****** The "List of Bute Researcher's Home Pages" has now been opened to general use, with a link added on http://www.rootsweb.com/~sctbutes/ just below the Mailing List link. ****** ****** ****** A couple of weeks ago I posted a message re the National Archives of Scotland - The following which is forwarded from Dick Sargent, Director of the National Register of Archives (England) may give an idea of likely developments on the NAS site ... ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ We are pleased to announce the release of an improved front end to the National Register of Archives database. There are now three options to be found at http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/nra2.htm 1) Browse and search http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/browser/browserhome.htm is designed for first time users who do not wish to use a keyboard to input search terms. It is assumed that they will have a working knowledge of the alphabet and be able to distinguish between persons, corporate bodies and families. Otherwise all they have to do is click their way through complete alphabetical listings of the NRA (about 150,000 records). We are registering these pages with the main search engines, so that general searches on the names of individuals etc will be directed to the NRA and via ARCHON to the appropriate repositories. 2) Simple search http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/simple.htm retrieves by any elements of personal, corporate, family or place names. 3) Detailed search http://www.hmc.gov.uk/nra/detail.htm offers complex interrogation of the Business, Organisations, Personal and Family indexes of the NRA. On the Business Index, for example, there are drop down lists for the sectors and subsectors of business activity and for counties in the British Isles. These can be searched in conjunction with elements of the firm's name, town and date of records. Thus a search of Engineering : Mechanical; Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering; Northumberland; 1850 retrieves the records of Armstrong Whitworth(10 groups of records), Hawthorn Leslie (9 groups) and Swan Hunter (6 groups). Current usage statistics indicate that for the year 2000-2001 the Commission's website can expect 500,000 visitors, 3,500,000 hits and 25 gigabytes of data served. The next stage in the development of the NRA is to link the descriptions of records directly to on-line catalogues as these are mounted by repositories or on the various UK archival networks like Access to Archives and the HE Hub. I will be pleased to receive any comments on the NRA and suggestions as to how we may better improve the service. Dick Sargent Director of the National Register of Archives Historical Manuscripts Commission Quality House, Quality Court, Chancery Lane London WC2A 1HP tel 020 7242 1198 fax 020 7831 3550 e-mail [email protected] website http://www.hmc.gov.uk ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ****** ****** ****** Feel free to join in and present your own items. Peter Cook [email protected] List maintainer and Co-host with Barbara < [email protected] > of the ButeshireGenWeb mailing list.