Webwatch

www.adlibsoft.com is where you can find a free Windows program for cataloguing collections, called Adlib Museum Lite. It is based on Adlib Museum, an established program used in hundreds of museums worldwide. The free version allows up to 5,000 record entries, including images (paid for versions allow unlimited record entries), and is intended for ‘small museums and private collectors, so that they can record details of their collections in a straightforward, yet professional way’. You can also create records for publications, periodicals and articles and link them to the relevant object records. Adlib Museum Lite could well be of help to local history societies. There is an excellent two page information leaflet on the site, downloadable as a pdf file, which explains what the program offers and how you can start using the program as soon as you have completed the automatic installation procedure. If your collection stays below 5,000 entries, then this is as close to a ‘free lunch’ as it gets. If you reach 5,001 entries you will probably be hooked and happy to pay for an upgrade to the full version. If you pass this information on, please tell your friends and colleagues that you saw it here first.

www.english-heritage.org.uk/bar is where you can view and search the 2006 Buildings at Risk register, which was issued in July. Given the important role that local historians can play in raising the profile of all listed buildings, this site is one you should definitely visit. If you don't have a computer, then go to your local library and log onto the internet.

www.libraryoflife.net includes a section where Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers can record their life history and experiences. I was interested in this site because my step-father, now aged 82, has been an active Red Cross volunteer for over 60 years. For the last twenty or so years he has managed a mobility aids service for visitors and residents in Eastbourne from various locations and I thought I might try and persuade him to allow me or my sister to record his memories on the site. Then I saw an appeal by Dr Nicole Matthews of the Media and Cultural Studies Department at Liverpool John Moores University for someone who might be interested in doing a full-time PhD based around an oral history of Red Cross volunteers in North East England and that it is linked with the Red Cross Library of Life on this website (contact N.D.Matthews@LJMU.AC.UK) The site has its limitations but, given its intentions, I think it's worth a visit, if only for the Red Cross section.

www.workinglife.org is a fantastic collection of photographs by Nick Hedges and Alan Hughes showing ordinary people from across Britain at work. As the home page says, the website celebrates 'the men, women and children who created the wealth of the country and never received the just recognition, or reward, for their labours'.

www.wcml.org.uk provides online access to the collections of the Working Class Movement Library in Salford and is easy to navigate. A search using 'Lenton' produced no hits, but 'Nottingham' generated 69 hits, many of them books, but also collections of trade union minutes. Well worth a visit to see what the collections contain about your locality or place of interest.

www.cottontown.org, 'the electronic version of Blackburn's Community History Dept', was launched in 2003 and 'gets nearly 1,000 hits a day'. It still looks fresh and attractive, although I did have trouble with the tram and narrowboat 'rides', which were smaller than a postcard when on-screen, but as examples of what can be achieved in terms of content they remain first class. Well worth a visit if you want an on-line outing!

www.openairclassroom.org.uk is aimed at teachers who want to plan a visit to the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum around the school ßcurriculum. As an approach to making better educational use of a historic resource it deserves to be seen by local historians involved in managing a historic building. Any idea which encourages visitors is worth exploring further.

www.kentarchaeology.org.uk is the online publishing website of Kent Archaeological Society. It lists downloadable ‘e-articles’ and ‘e-books’. Joan Thirsk told us about the site because she and four female colleagues have jointly written Hadlow: Life, Land and People in a Wealden Parish, which presents and discusses a hitherto unknown survey from 1460 of the 1200 acre Hadlow Manor. They have made extensive and imaginative use of maps and aerial photography to show the locations of all the tenements in Hadlow and sub-manors in Hadlow parish. The survey is discussed and presented in considerable detail over 15 chapters. The whole e-book is downloadable free, although Joan and her colleagues are planning to publish it in book form later this year (we will publicise its availability as and when we receive more details).

www.under2wires.co.uk is a delightful website about Black Country trolleybuses, with the chance to take an online trip on the Black Country Living Museum’s nearly ½ mile long route (‘the longest double-deck trolleybus route in the world’). As is often the way, there is never a trolleybus when you want one, then two come along within days of one another (Sandtoft and the Black Country Living Museum). The 662 service passed within yards of my home in Wembley and I went on it to Harlesden most weeks with my grandmother and then to work as a teenager. My last public trolleybus ride was in Walsall was with my grandfather in the week after Christmas 1969, I had moved to Birmingham from Harrow only a few months before. There were about 50 trolleybus systems in Britain, but by the early 1970s they had all gone. Mention trolleybuses to anyone old enough to remember them, then watch their face light up and a smile appear. In Nottingham we now have one modern tram route, with the government continuously delaying any decision about a further two routes (despite the tram being a great success), but I still think trolleybuses offer an equally environmentally friendly option, as well as being cheaper and more flexible.

Robert Howard