A £30,000 award is set to help sell East Lancashire and its products to the outside world.

A consortium made up of the Chamber of Commerce, three local firms and Blackburn College has been awarded the cash to help pay for a special multi-media project.

The consortium was one of 38 successful out of 200 which applied for funding from the £2 million pot of the DTI's Information Society Initiative's Multimedia Demonstrator Programme. Multimedia presentations will now be made for the Chamber, TDS House, Abbey Telecom and Groupe Panache as part of the 14 month project. And it will also see the creation of a digital archive for East Lancashire that local firms can access.

Organisers hope the project will help promote East Lancashire as a business location and assist individual firms present themselves in a positive light. Companies will be able to access the archive possibly for free or at reduced rates and use high quality images within it for their own presentations.

"It means the cost of producing a multi-media package will be substantially reduced for companies. And the presentations we are working on for the project should give firms a range of ideas on how to do their own," explained Mike Lawton of TDS House.

A large quantity of photographs for the archive have already been supplied by the East Lancashire Promotions Partnership and organisers hope the archive will rapidly build up with quality images from local firms and photographers.

A taster of the multimedia presentation being created for the Chamber will be shown at the Open Day on Friday at the Dunkenhalgh Hotel, Clayton-le-Moors.

"Technology is a problem solver not something to be afraid of. It can help in every aspect of our lives," said Science and Technology Minister Ian Taylor.

"However it is no good telling people that multimedia can improve their business - you've got to show them examples of how it is done and benefits gained."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.