- U.K. Public Record Office To Put Catalogue Online The Public Record Office (PRO) is about to put its entire catalogue on to the web. A prototype system is already available, and the PRO hopes the full catalogue, which describes its entire archive of 8 million documents, will be online by the end of the year. Once the catalogue is online, the PRO hopes to begin placing many of its most-popular documents online, including William Shakespeare's will, Guy Fawkes's confession, and the crew and passenger list of the Titanic. The catalogued collection spans documents ranging from the Domesday book, compiled in 1086, to the present day and includes all central-government files. According to Anne Crawford of the PRO, the system initially will allow users to search all of the documents' descriptions online. "Putting 8 million documents on the web is just too big a task," she says. "So we're making the catalogue available, which includes the location of the file and a brief description of it. This allows users to see what we have. "We will also allow them to order a document online so that when they come to Kew their documents are ready and waiting. We hope this will save a lot of wasted journeys." Currently, researchers must either visit Kew in person to check the availability of a document or commission somebody to do the research. According to Crawford, more than two-thirds of the archive's users are family historians who often travel to Kew from another country. "We are a great resource for academics, but we also get a lot of interest from individuals. With 8 million records, which include a lot of census data, we are probably one of the best resources in the world for individuals tracing their family history. We found that almost all our visitors had access to the net at home or work so it made sense for us to try to offer some access to our records over the net." The PRO also plans to put census data online. Crawford said, "One of the first things we will put online in its entirety is the 1901 census; we are currently preparing this for 2001. However, we want to get the catalogue online first, then we can track which documents are the most popular and put those online." To see the prototype catalogue system, look at: http://www.pro.gov.uk ------------------ This article is from Eastman's Online Genealogy Newsletter and is copyright 1999 by Richard W. Eastman. It is re-published here with the permission of the author.