On 29 June 2005, the AHRC awarded Professor Lionel Bently, along with Martin Kretschmer of Bournmouth University, a resource enhancement grant worth £292, 909. The award will fund a two-year project to create a database of historical materials from five jurisdictions (the UK, US, France, German and Italy). With the help of an advisory committee, national editors will be appointed to research and select the fifty most important documents from the history of copyright in each jurisdiction. The national editors will write commentaries, explaining the significance of the documents and the reasons for their selection. The documents will be scanned, transliterated and translated, and presented to users through a publicly accessible database entered through the CIPIL site. All the documents will be stored using, and will be capable of being accessed through, not proprietary software. The project is scheduled to last two years, and the database should be running in 2007.
