As part of a National Lottery Heritage Fund bid in one of our villages, the AHG were approached and asked whether we could digitise the various paper records held within our local Church for safekeeping. As the main thrust of the funding request was to repair the Church roof, the village was keen to get the papers transferred to electronic media as swiftly as possible. The AHG recognised that simply scanning and logging the papers would not help people find the information and we researched the growing number of community-based archives up and down the country, to ensure that anything we did would enable everyone to gain access to the records – whether local or abroad. A key aspiration was to build a platform not just for one village, but for the area covered by the AHG and so Aveland Archive was born. Working with a professional company, Community Sites, we have the shell of the archive and are now looking for volunteers to help digitise the content that we are starting to accumulate. Aveland Archive works on a not for profit, non-commercial basis to share the information that is deposited with us, giving full attribution on the source of this data.