Trust wants scan project volunteers

The Bletchley Park Trust has issued an appeal for volunteers to help in a project that will see index cards, used to correlate secret information from the Second World War, scanned using equipment and software donated by HP.

With the code-name Ultra, the operation saw data from intercepted and decrypted enemy communications machine-decoded by mechanical and electronic means such as the Colossus computer.

Bletchley Park Trust director Simon Greenish told ZDNet UK that HP will train volunteers in how to use the software and ongoing digital support. The project is likely to take five years to complete, he added.

After the original documents are scanned, metadata will likely be attached to the pages to allow readers to carry out searches. Optical character recognition, which turns scanned body copy into searchable text, may also be possible.

Mr Greenish added: "We've got thousands of card indexes on different subject matter, handwritten by different people in different coloured ink. The object is to enable people to look at the original documents in scanned form."

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