Your community heritage is both valuable and fragile. Intriguing information, in the form of photographs, documents and memories about community life, is all too often lost to subsequent generations.

The Cambridgeshire Community Archives Network (CCAN) aims to preserve this diverse and easily lost source of cultural and community heritage, and will make it available to the widest possible audience online.

Funded by a Heritage grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) awarded in 2006, the CCAN Project is creating a cross-searchable network of around 50 digital community archive groups across the county.

With support and assistance from Cambridgeshire’s Libraries, Archives and Information Service, each community group creates its own digital archive on the CCAN website, using equipment at local Community Access Points.

Community archive groups are invited to visit the County Record Offices at Cambridge and Huntingdon to explore the variety of records held about their own community and their potential for learning more about local history.

CCAN is designed to be a sustainable project, continuing to support itself beyond the period funded by HLF (which ends in late 2008) through a volunteer group forum guided by a steering committee. It will also become a sub-group of the Cambridgeshire Association of Local History.

Please email us with any queries you might have about the project, using the Contact Us link in the right hand column of this page.