- Professor Tim Hitchcock, The University of Hertfordshire
- Professor Clive Emsley, The Open University
- Professor Robert Shoemaker, The Univesrity of Sheffield
An AHRC research grant of nearly £300,000 has enabled academics from the University of Hertfordshire, Sheffied and the Open University to double in size the trial proceedings now available to view on the website Old Bailey Online and provide access to the largest single source of searchable information about "ordinary" British lives and behaviour ever published.
The site offers users a valuable insight into a diverse range of crimes from pick-pocketing and robbery, to abduction and murder. Some of the most sensational cases ever to be tried at the Old Bailey are also now available for people to view, including the trials in which Oscar Wilde was convicted of indecency and the infamous Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, who killed his wife was bought to justice.
Published by HRI Online, the electronic publishing arm of the University of Sheffield's Humanities Research Institute (HRI), the website details over 197,000 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court right up 
until 1913. The trials contain fascinating facts about the circumstances of crimes, the lives of the accused, witnesses and victims, and verdicts and punishments handed down by judges.
Trials involving robbery and murder, as well as terrorism, occupied the courts in historical London, just as they do today. But they reveal very different attitudes to crime, justice and punishment. One trial, for example, details a child as young as thirteen, who was sentanced to death for breaking into a house and stealing a number of goods.
The addition of nineteenth and early twentieth century trials also highlights 'new' crimes, such as mothers convicted for neglecting their children, reflecting people's attitudes at the time.
Professor Robert Shoemaker, Head of the Deapartment of History at the University of Sheffield and co-director of the project, said: "This new expansion means it is now possible to search records of 197,745 individual trials, running to 110,000 pages of text and some 120 million words.
"Up until now this treasure trove of social, leagal and family history has only been available to a few dedicated historians, who were prepared to spend months peering at microfilms. Now everyone from school children and amateur historians to scholars working in a range of academic disciplines can have easy access to this wealth of information.
The court records were obtained from scanned images of the original printed pages, using a combination of manual rekeying with optical character recognition (OCR) technology. The results of the two processes were then compared by computer. Any differences alerted editors to a possible error, which was checked and corrected.
Since its initial launch in 2003, the website has had over 10 million visits, with 20,000 visits a day at its peak.
Image courtesy www.oldbaileyonline.org.