£5 back - polymer © Bank of England [2015]

£5 back – polymer © Bank of England [2015]. (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

This week, we discovered that Winston Churchill has made the move from paper into polymer, with the announcement from the Bank of England that the next version of the five-pound note featuring the former Prime Minister will be manufactured from transparent plastic film. His papers, which are kept at the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, have, of course, already made the transition from paper into microfilm, and now digital. Some 800,000 documents can now be searched via this resource, including the letter containing revelation (to this librarian) that in 1891 the young Churchill exchanged his bike, believed to be worth a fiver, for Dodo, a fine-bred British bull dog.

The IHR Library is currently running a 30-day trial of the digital resource. The papers can be accessed via any of the Library computers via http://www.churchillarchive.com/. We would be interested in knowing what you think about the resource, and whether it would be useful for your research. Please contact ihr.library@london.ac.uk or Tweet to us at @IHR_Library.