Bletchley Park WW2 online archive

Bletchley Park, the UK’s code breaking headquarters during World War II, will make more than a million documents available to the public online.

The project is expected to last up to five years and will be carried out at the Milton Keynes base by the Bletchley Park Trust with the assistance of HP, who will provide the software to transfer the documentation to the Web.

HP will also provide training and technical support, according to Simon Greenish, director of Bletchley Park Trust.

“I think there will be a lot of interest,” said Greenish IT PRO. “What will be particularly interesting is the index of cards, which includes literally thousands of thousands of cards with summaries of the messages. I think this is something new and researchers will be interested in it, j ‘I’m quite sure. “

He explained that not much is known about a significant part of the documentation stored in the archives.

“There are literally full rooms and it’s only when we’ve gone through it all that we’ll understand exactly what we have,” Greenish added.

Bletchley Park has operated as a museum since 1994, but much of the extensive archives is inaccessible to the public. Once the project is completed, some of the documents will be available for free viewing, while others will need to be paid for.

During the war, the code breakers at the site sought to decipher German messages sent through the Enigma machine.

The process was extremely difficult at the start of WWII, given the very slim chances of figuring out what cipher letters were, but genius mathematician and computer legend Alan Turing developed an idea that led to the creation of the Bomb, a mechanical electro-machine that greatly reduces the odds.