The following text provides detailed information about PastFinder and its aims

• The Greater Manchester Past Finder (GMPF) project is proposed by a consortium of the Record Offices of the ten metropolitan councils in Greater Manchester. They are Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, and Wigan councils - together with the Greater Manchester County Record Office (GMCRO) which is run jointly by the councils. The Record Offices collect, preserve and make accessible to the public important records of the life and history of their areas. The GMCRO provides certain technical services and cares for archives relating to the conurbation as a whole.
  
  

• The records illuminate the history of Britain's second largest conurbation and the world's first industrial city. They describe the explosive growth of its industries, canals and railways during the Industrial Revolution They record the work of social institutions such as trades unions, co-operatives, hospitals and Nonconformist congregations, and the development of political parties and local government.

• Users of the archives face a number of problems. Locating relevant records is particularly difficult in the Greater Manchester area. The dense network of personal and organisational relationships across the conurbation, and the frequent changes in administrative boundaries mean that records are often not deposited in the area that users would expect. Catalogues of the records are of very variable quality and accuracy, and there is no unified catalogue of the holdings of the Greater Manchester Record Offices. Finding relevant records is at best laborious, and can involve visits to several record offices. At worst, because of the inadequacies of current catalogues, it may be impossible to identify all the relevant materials.

• Greater Manchester archive services have attempted to overcome some of the problems facing them through collaborative action. For example since 1994 they have produced an annual joint listing of accessions and a free pamphlet guide to services and holdings.

• At English national level, the Access to Archives (A2A) project is to harness the potential of Information and Communication Technology to make information about archives more widely accessible and to improve the efficiency of archive services. A2A will create a single web gateway on which detailed finding aids for all significant archive holdings throughout the country will ultimately be placed.

• The GMPF project will participate in and contribute to the A2A project by upgrading all the significant high-level primary finding aids to archives held by its members to the relevant international cataloguing standards adopted by the A2A project. To these will be added secondary finding aids (indexes of archive content by subject, person and place) by the A2A central support organisation. These finding aids will be converted to digital format, and posted to both an upgraded version of the GMCRO website and the A2A site.

• This will form an extensive source of information on archives across the conurbation of Greater Manchester. It will be immediately accessible to the public without charge from computer terminals at each record office. Alternatively it can be accessed from a home PC or local library or in a distant country, enabling members of the public to identify in advance records they wish to consult and to plan their visits to the record offices. Action will be taken to publicise the new information resources both to existing users and to the general public.

• The project will be managed by the Greater Manchester County Archivist and carried out by a small project team of qualified archivists over an 18 month period.

• The GMPF project will unlock the valuable resources of Greater Manchester archives. High quality information will become freely available to the general public as well as to students and researchers. It will be a powerful tool for increasing study and understanding of the economic, social, political and environmental history of a city region with a distinctive place in the development of modern Britain.