A NEW Community Spirit initiative will be of interest to Bolton people researching family trees or local history.

MLA North West (Museums, Libraries and Archives North West) is working with various partners - including the Bolton Archives and Local Studies office - to convert thousands of pages of archive catalogues into electronic form.

The project will involve church, parish and local government archives.

Data will be available online next year as part of the national Access to Archives project (A2A).

The website - www.a2a.org.uk - already holds details of more than seven million documents from more than 350 different archives around the country. Records date from the 10th century to the present.

The site gives descriptions of the documents available, together with reference numbers and information about where they are kept.

Janice Tullock, MLA North West's archive development officer, said: "It is a huge task, but we are confident that by 2005 we will have successfully converted 23,000 pages of archival catalogues from around the North-west and this will then offer everyone the chance to begin researching family trees and other aspects of local history using the A2A database.

"Many people who want to use local archives in Bolton have found the paper-based indexing complicated and off-putting, but projects like this are making the process much more accessible."

The Community Spirit team will be based at the Greater Manchester County Record Office. A £50,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund supports the project.