A cash injection from the Heritage Lottery Fund will enable people to browse through records of Oxfordshire's past from the comfort of their home on the computer.

Record offices across the south-east have been successful in their joint-bid for the 85,600 grant, which will be used to transfer information from their catalogues to the Internet.

The project, named "Landlord to Labourer", will include documents from great estates and country houses, which show how they were run and include the names of people who worked for landowners.

Senior archivist for Oxfordshire Record Office, Mark Priddey said: "A lot of our catalogues and documents and are on old cards and are not user-friendly or computer compatible. The Lottery grant will enable us to put some of this information on to the Internet, so people can access our records without having to come into the office to do so."

It is hoped the records will be available on the Internet by March 2002.