A plan unveiled in March by Liverpool's Central Library may be England's answer to the United States' Family History Library. The Central Library will spend 40 million pounds (about $64 million) to digitize millions of archive files and to create a 21st-century heritage center. The digital archives, projected to cost 10 million pounds ($16 million), will include Liverpool's charter, birth certificates, school registers, emigration information and much more. The new heritage center will allow people all over the world to access their family histories online. Both projects should be complete by 2007, Liverpool's 700th anniversary. For more information on the Liverpool Central Library, go to <www.liverpool.gov.uk>. Click on A to Z of Council Services, then Libraries. Under How to Find Us, click on Central Library.

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More than 30 years ago, John Adler noticed a New York Times advertisement touting duplicate volumes of Harper's Weekly — the leading illustrated paper of record in the 19th century. So he seized the opportunity, and bought a set of the newspapers, published between 1857 and 1916, for about $10,000. Once Adler had amassed his impressive collection, he decided to tackle a massive public-service effort. “Nobody knew what was in these Harper's Weeklys,” he says. “I decided to get them manually indexed so people would know what was there.” Last year, after about a decade of hard work, he launched HarpWeek <www.harpweek.com>, a Web site featuring the content of his Harper's Weekly collection.