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We are in the process of replacing our current Catalogue and DocumentsOnline service with Discovery.

Discovery is The National Archives' new catalogue, providing a new way to explore our collections. Discovery is much more than a replacement for the current Catalogue, as it has been designed to host, search and display the many different databases and datasets held at The National Archives. By doing so it provides a more robust and integrated system to manage current and future data and storage needs, along with a consistent and seamless user experience.

New image delivery service

Discovery will provide an image delivery service. Users will therefore be able to search our collection and download digitised documents, where available, all in one place.

We'll be switching off our existing image delivery service, DocumentsOnline, on Wednesday 9 May. At this point all hyperlinks currently pointing to DocumentsOnline will be redirected to Discovery. Until that point DocumentsOnline will remain available through our website and the computers in our reading rooms at Kew. We're launching some new web pages tomorrow to showcase various digitised collections, which will all link to Discovery.

The Catalogue is still available, and will remain so until this summer, but we will be using Discovery as the primary way to search our collections. Discovery offers additional features to the current Catalogue, including displaying search results in order of relevance, allowing users to filter their search results by subject, date range and collection, and enabling users to tag records with keywords to expand on catalogue descriptions.