People interested in our local heritage are invited to have their say on access to the Dorset History Centre.

But hurry as a survey, which can be accessed on www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/DorsetHC2 closes this Friday 9 December.

The survey will form part of an application to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, to extend the archive stores, improve public facilities and offer outreach services.

Dorset History Centre in Dorchester is the publicly funded archive service for Dorset and BCP Council areas. It holds 1,000 years of the county’s written history held within thousands of varied collections. These include: photographs from local photographer Graham V Herbert; the archives of writers Thomas Hardy and William Barnes; the Dame Elisabeth Frink collection and the Bankes archive from Kingston lacy – including William John Bankes’s notebooks that helped crack the code of hieroglyphics.

The Dorset History Centre gives free access to thousands of original maps, books, letters and photographs. There is also an opportunity to discover your family history with free access to ancestry.com, parish and newspaper collections.

There are also resource packs that can be used by schools and other groups. One of these packs is Imagining the Past that includes conversation prompts for those affected by mild to moderate dementia and their carers.