Huge interest in Old Bailey website

The recently expanded Old Bailey website has had to increase server capacity to deal with the huge volume of visitors.

The move to increase server capacity has been taken to prevent future crashes, such as the one which disabled the site on 29 April, just two days after it was relaunched.

Nearly two million people visited the site on its first day of relaunch. This figure was surpassed a week later with over three million visits.

The website is run by the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire and The Open University and recently expanded to include details of criminal trials from 1674 to 1913, from just after the Great Fire of London to just before World War I.

Overseas interest is particularly high as visitors from Australia to the US trawl the site to gain an insight into information about their ancestors and a diverse range of crimes from pick-pocketing and robbery, to cattle rustling and murder.

Up until the site's launch in 2003, the archive information was only available to view via microfilm. Now visitors to the site can easily search trials by verdict, crime and punishment and even view original case transcripts, which have been digitally transferred to the website.

Professor David Shepherd, director of the Humanities Research Institute (HRI), said: "We knew that interest in the Old Bailey site would be high and we planned for this. However, we were overwhelmed by just how strong the demand from all over the world turned out to be."

www.oldbaileyonline.org