2002 marks not only the tenth anniversary of the Bradford Memory Bank but also the official launch of a new district-wide Community History Archive which exploits the very latest computer technology.

Community archives are collections of photographs, documents, stories, reminiscences and video clips and it is the members of that community that choose what goes into the archive.

Special software (comm@net) has been developed to allow volunteers, many of whom have never touched a computer before, to input the data and create the archive.

A volunteer working on the project in Bradford Library

Many different types of communities are getting involved with the comm@net project. The first in West Yorkshire was set up in Batley and mining communities, such as South Elmsall, are also involved.

While some of the older community history archives can already be seen on the internet the Bradford Archive, which to date consists of around 800 images as well as memories and anecdotes, can at present only be viewed at the Local Studies department at Bradford Central Library.

There are plans to network the Archive across the district's libraries but already the project is being taken out to villages across the district using a laptop and a large video screen. More than once people who have come along have been surprised to see pictures of themselves appear on the screen, although it may have been in a school photo taken 50 years ago.

An image from The Community History Archive as it appears on the screen

People telling their own history is nothing new in Bradford. More than twenty years ago a major oral history project took place in the city and over 800 interviews were completed before the funding disappeared.

The Memory Bank emerged from a project initiated by Age Concern in connection with Bradford Libraries.

Bradford's Local Studies Librarian Carol Greenwood says: "It was a memory sharing project based on the oral history tapes so that people could share their memories and these were taken out into places like old people's homes. We realised they also wanted something else because people in their eighties and nineties could not hear so well and we had the idea of putting other things with the tapes."

Objects which people could handle such as skipping ropes, inkwells and darning mushrooms were made into packs together with smelly things such as mothballs and carbolic soap. Local history groups took the packs into the homes and it was realised that they too had collections of material but this was not accessible to other people in the district.

Images, memories, sound and video can now be shared. Carol Greenwood says: "The good thing about this is that it is the things that people feel are interesting about their own community so they're selecting what they think is important about the area where they live, or where they used to live and I think that's important. They can describe the photographs. If it is a May Day procession, for instance, they can say how it came about, why they selected the May Queen, who made the costumes, where they got the money from so it could add to the picture and, of course, it's all searchable afterwards."

For more information about the Bradford Memory Bank and Community History Archive contact the Local Studies Department, 6th Floor, Central Library, Prince's Way, Bradford.