ICAEW has made a £5,000 donation to Kingston University to help digitise a historical document archive which traces the development of the legal framework for insolvency based on the official papers of Muir Hunter, the lawyer most closely involved with key legislation inn this area.

Insolvency expert Dr John Tribe runs the university's Muir Hunter Museum of Bankruptcy, which is a collection of the papers of the leading QC who was closely involved in the drafting of the Cork Report in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which shaped the UK's current insolvency rules and regulations.

Dr Tribe described the documents as a 'treasure trove' and said the archive would see Kingston University becomes the seat of the history of bankruptcy and insolvency. However, the sheer volume of material means that considerable resources are required to identify and catalogue the information.

'There's years of work to be done here - whoever comes after me will probably still be chipping away at it in 50 years' time. At the moment I've got two PhD students working on it, one doing all the scanning and the other liaising with the technical people and cataloguing it.

'So far over the course of the last year we've managed to digitise about a third of it. My aim is to raise at least £20,000 to pay for everything that needs to be done. It's a very slow process but what we've managed to compile so far is great for scholars,' Dr Tribe said.

ICAEW director Bob Pinder, who specialises in the field, said the institute was happy to contribute to further awareness of the topic. 'This archive will help us learn more about the underlying rationale behind the Insolvency Act 1986. The archive is a key component to an understanding of insolvency both in its historical context but also in terms of how we might develop policy in the modern age,' he said.

The current insolvency rules are under review and are set for a complete overhaul in 2014 to reflect the demands of the market.