There are thousands of individual archives already scanned or being uploaded onto the internet.

Here are just a few:

The Holocaust Documents The German government has agreed to upload 30-50 million documents about Nazi persecutions. The documents will include details of 17 million victims and are currently held in the central German village of Bad Arolsen. They had previously been off limits but will be accessible after a scanning process that will take about six months.

The Darwin Collection The complete works of Charles Darwin are being uploaded by Cambridge University. The site has digitised 50,000 pages of text and 40,000 images of original publications, all of which can be searched. The collection includes Darwin's notebooks while on the Beagle voyage to the Galapagos Islands and dozens of his letters. The project's director, Dr John van Wyhe, spent four years gathering the collection. So far he has uploaded about 50 per cent, and hopes to have the project completed in time for Darwin's bicentenary in 2009.

The Making of America Collection (http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/) "Making of America" is a wonderful library of US historical documents, many previously unseen by the general public.

Mostly dealing with 19th-century daily life, they include fascinating detail on psychology, sociology and religion. Of particular Irish interest are the writings of a sociologist who visited New York's Irish slums in the early 20th century and discovered that the Irish hated the colour green and had a deep fear of the Irish witch, the Banshee.