Hartlepool Borough Council

PortCities Hartlepool, led by the Hartlepool Maritime Resource, aims to make available to a world wide audience via the Internet, an exciting and accessible learning resource which focuses on Hartlepool's important maritime history and development.

By using digitised 19th and 20th Century source material from the range of high quality collections and archives contributed by Hartlepool Borough Libraries, Hartlepool Museums Service and Teesside Archives, we will provide visitors to PortCities Hartlepool with a unique and valuable insight into Hartlepool's maritime heritage.

PortCities Hartlepool, is a New Opportunities Fund digitisation project and is one of a consortium of partner projects around the British Isles, led by the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London - brought together under the title of PortCities UK . The consortium also includes Liverpool Libraries and Information Services (the Mersey-Gateway Project), Southampton City Council (the Plimsoll Project) and Bristol City Council (Discovering Bristol).

The New Opportunities Fund's £50 million UK-wide digitisation programme is designed to bring the learning material and resources currently contained in galleries, libraries, museums and universities directly into homes and communities. The Fund, the largest of the National Lottery good cause distributors, has awarded grants to 150 organisations across the UK, large and small, who are converting a huge variety of material into digital format. The range of material being digitised includes archaeology, maritime, architecture, fine art, social and oral history.