This archive contains high quality digital scans of Alan Turing's documents held in the archive in King's College Cambridge which were previously only available to visitors there. Searches are possible based on the catalogue information but not the contents of the documents. Viewing and printing of documents is available, subject to copyright restrictions.
The Turing Trust has made a lot of important contributions to the archive at King's College.
A hypertext catalogue of the Digital Archive is available with links to the scans and links between related items. The King's College Archive Centre also has an online version of the complete catalogue for the Turing Collection and has information about how you can arrange to visit them in person if you need to view the original documents.
The catalogue was jointly created by the King's College team and by the National Cataloguing Unit for the Archives of Contemporary Scientists who also have a list of other catalogues and links to on-line catalogues.
The originals were scanned on an EPSON GT1000 flatbed at 150 or 300dpi. These are compressed into multiscale JPEG in TIFF files and made available for viewing using a Java applet and image server. A technical report is available describing the process.
Previously IBM's DB2 database was used to store the text data and the system ran on two Sun E450 servers with RAID storage. Today a MySQL database is used on a fast Linux Virtual Machine (AMT would have been amazed) . The web pages are created using PHP with the Apache web server.
The Electronics and Computer Science department of the University of Southampton, the British Computer Society and the Institution of Electrical Engineers funded the project, with much help from the King's College archive.
The Southampton team were: Prof. Tony Hey, Prof. Wendy Hall, Dr Kirk Martinez, Gareth Hughes, Dr Gary Wills, Mark Weal and Nick Lamb. The King's team were: Jacky Cox, Ros Moad and Dr Jonathan Swinton.
The system is hosted in the University of Southampton's Electronics and Computer Science dept. In case of problems contact Kirk Martinez
You should be able to browse or search the catalogue with any modern browser. To see images from the archive your browser must be configured to accept cookies and you must read and accept the terms of use for the site and for some individual images.
To use the high resolution image viewer applet you need a Java-capable web browser. If you can't see images you either don't have Java or the database is down. We recommend Firefox and the latest Java plug-ins from Sun (installed automatically when you see your first image).
Metadata from the archive is also available for harvesting by OAI-PMH compliant harvesters. The base URL for this archive is http://www.turingarchive.org/oai/
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