The archive of Alan Turing's work

Alan Turing, the man who led the team responsible for cracking the Nazi's Enigma cryptography machine at Bletchley Park during the last war, has had a significant proportion of his work made available via the internet. Further funding has been promised by Elsevier Science in order to begin the next phase of the project but more money is still needed.

Described as 'one of the most creative thinkers of the twentieth century', Turing laid the foundations of modern computing and was also distinguished in the fields of artificial intelligence, logic, statistics and developmental biology.

The trial project has digitised about one third of the archive, originally housed at King's College, Cambridge. Funding came jointly from the Department of Electronics and Computer Science of the University of Southampton, the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and the British Computer Society (BCS).

Hosted by the University of Southampton, the online archive contains high-quality images and allows rapid searching.

Southampton University's Wendy Hall, leader of the digitisation project said: "We have completed the first phase of a trial to scan this material and make it publicly available through a web site. The next step is to raise further sponsorship so that the remaining two thirds can be included. I am delighted Elsevier Science has joined us as a sponsor for this next phase and we are very grateful for their generous support."

Elsevier has previously published Turing's Collected Works under its North Holland imprint.

Last April, the Enigma cryptography machine was stolen from Bletchley Park - now a museum dedicated to wartime code-breaking - by Dennis Yates and ransomed for £28,000.

In true cloak-and-dagger style, the thief communicated with the police using code words hidden in the personal pages of the Sunday Times and a secret page on the Bletchley Park Museum web site.

Yates had removed three rotors vital to the functioning of the machine - they have yet to be recovered. The thief was eventually caught after a police stake-out in a graveyard where a video tape containing instructions for the 'money drop' was concealed.

Turing's work considerably shortened the second world war.

• www.turingarchive.org

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