NEEDLE, Rex. A Portrait of Bourne: the story of a Lincolnshire market town in words and pictures. CD-ROM. £20 (including postage). It records 2,500 images and over 500,000 words.

This is perhaps the shape of local history records to come. It is certainly the first effort I have seen at recording the history of a place in words and pictures on a CD. The result here is so fantastically good that it is hard to believe that any similar attempt for other places could be its superior. I have not been able to check the number of words or pictures but the above claim may well be as accurate as anyone will ever discover.

It is the easiest thing to find one's way around the contents. After preliminary pages on the project one has choices of the town and its history and the local villages. Under the town heading there are further choices, ranging from pieces on the Romans, the Domesday Book, various topics and snapshots in words of the town at different phases of its development in the last two hundred years, e.g. Bourne in 1871, Bourne in 1909.

Under 'Town Hall fire in 1933' there are three black and white photos, text and, what librarians call, "see also references" to other sites. Further sites are listed under buildings of interest and the amount of research Mr Needle has undertaken is revealed. He has been photographing in colour an enormous range of subjects and collected together contemporary texts and old pictures to illuminate his findings.

I was especially impressed by the Domesday entry which includes an illustration of the container in which the original is still housed in the Public Record Office while sample pages go on to transcribe the full text for Bourne and also that for many of the surrounding villages and, to make it fully usable by those unfamiliar with the ancient words, provides a glossary of terms.

Under the heading of "Villages" the compiler ranges equally widely. Every village or hamlet near Bourne has an entry, ranging from Horbling to the north and Tallington and Deeping to the south. As an example I looked at the entry for Twenty; there is a long piece on the school and its various head teachers, pictures of the station, then and now, and various other pieces, followed by a "see also" to the Great Flood of 1910, and, on that site, he has found five photographs (including two of the railway under water).

I cannot praise this disk too highly. Mr Needle has beavered away for many years in archives and old newspaper files, taken hundreds of very good colour photographs and, finally, put all his research into an easily used form, making full use of the latest CD technology (and that itself would be beyond many of us).

Raymond Carroll
Reviews Editor
Spring 2006

NEEDLE, Rex. A Portrait of Bourne: the story of a Lincolnshire market town in words and pictures [new edition 2009]. CD-ROM. £20 (including postage).

The spring issue of this quarterly in 2006 carried a review of the first edition of Mr Needle's immense efforts to record all he could find relating to Bourne's history and development. And not only the town itself but much on the area that surrounds it. This latest version now contains more than 1,500,000 words but also has nearly 4,000 images and, Mr Needle tells me, more pictures keep turning up. The disc is very user-friendly and navigation around its contents present no problems, even to me; and I am by no means a  computer buff. The author has been able to hold the cost to its original price. He also promises a book later this year which will distil the essence of his continuing research.