One million pages of documents from the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals will be made available on the internet if Boston's Harvard University can find the necessary money.
By Jane Standley
BBC correspondent in New York
Harvard's Law School has already posted 7,000 pages on one of its own web sites but it says it needs as much as $7m to make the entire Nuremberg archive available.
Nuremberg sought justice for the millions murdered
The massive project to put the one million pages of transcripts from the Nuremberg trials onto the internet is likely to take 10 years to complete.
The pages have been accessible to the public for the past 50 years though only a few people - academics and hunters of war criminals - have sifted through the mountains of material.
But the papers are now becoming very fragile and the idea to put them onto the internet came about as part of an effort to preserve them.
Seven thousand pages - a volume which covers only a third of the first 13 trials held between 1946 and 1949 - were posted on a Harvard website but then the money to continue ran out.
The university is now looking for financial grants and gifts to continue.
No startling new information about the Holocaust is expected to come to light if the massive internet archive is completed but scholars have welcomed the move.
They say it will make the Holocaust more immediate to readers and will also make the study of areas such as slave labour, the torture of prisoners-of-war and medical experimentation on humans more accessible.