Internet resources: Winston Churchill archive to go online

Winston Churchill's vast archive – everything from school reports to a personal copy of the "finest hour" speech – will be digitised and offered online.

The Churchill Archive Trust has agreed a deal with publisher Bloomsbury to make available more than 1m items. These include about 2,500 archive boxes of letters, telegrams, documents and photographs that are stored in Cambridge and currently viewable only by appointment.

Churchill's papers were, controversially at the time, bought for the nation from his heirs in 1995 using £12m of lottery money. They are currently stored at the Churchill Archives Centre (CAC). After years of cataloguing and transferring them to microfilm, the next logical step was making the archives available to everyone – although not for free, said CAC's director Allen Packwood.

Packwood said people would have the opportunity to see an enormous array of historical material without the layers of interpretation that had been added over the years. "It is an opportunity for people to make their own judgments," he said. "You'll be able to see what was on Churchill's desk on a day-to-day basis and how he responded to it. You'll be able to compare easily what he was saying in public at the same time as what he was saying privately."

When the archive goes live in 2012, organisations and individuals will have to pay to access them. Exact figures have yet to be confirmed, but Frances Pinter, the publisher of Bloomsbury Academic, said they would keep the price low to ensure a wide reach.

Pinter said the database would be created in a way that researchers could find historical needles in haystacks. "As an archival collection, there's nothing like this. The nearest comparison would be something like the presidential archives in America and they are not as digitally advanced as we will be”.