Documents and images charting 300 years of Manx history are being made available at the click of a button.

As part of a three-year project, a dedicated online catalogue has been launched by the Public Record Office, which aims to make its national archive collections more widely accessible.

The fledgling digital catalogue cover multiple aspects of island life, including infrastructure, environment, wartime, healthcare, industry, and tourism.

If a digital version of the record exists, you will be able to view that record online.

But it will be a huge undertaking to digitise all the records – if you could line up all the records in the archive they would stretch about 7km.

However, there is a priority list of popular catalogues which the team are working their way through.

Here, for example, you will find the fabulous glass lantern slides in the Board of Advertising collection, dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

These include a picture of Manx novelist Hall Caine in his study at Greeba Castle, Manx fisher girl Miss Crennell outside her thatched cottage and a view of the Tynwald Day ceremony from 1900.

If no digital version of the catalogue item, then you will need to view the records in the Public Record Office reading room at its base on the Spring Valley industrial estate in Braddan.

The Public Record Office, which is part of Central Registry, preserves the historically and culturally significant records created by island’s public bodies, chiefly Tynwald, government departments, courts and local authorities.

Records date predominantly from the late 19th and 20th centuries, although some go back the 1700s with the earliest of all in the archive being the famous Act of Settlement of 1704 – the Manx Magna Carta.

Its work is defined by statute and selection is carried out by a team of qualified and experienced archivists.

At present, the collections consist largely of paper, photographic and microfilm records, which are held in climate-controlled conditions in the Public Record Office storerooms at Spring Valley.

But it’s not just these that need conservation. Items that arrive in digital format also need protection – and the team at the Public Record Office has been working on a solution to do just that.

A digital repository has now also been created, to enable digital records to be accepted from public bodies and carry out measures to ensure that these survive as part of the national archives.

David Heelas, who has steered the three-year project from the outset, said: ‘One of the greatest challenges facing archive institutions today is the preservation of digital records.

‘Digital records – which the Isle of Man government began to create in the mid-1980s - are vulnerable for a number of factors, including the rapid pace of technological change and obsolescence of formats.

‘The Public Record Office is responsible for ensuring that these digital records are preserved alongside their analogue counterparts.

‘We now have a solution in place which will safeguard digital records and make them accessible to future generations’.