Indeed, Kubrick's movies are a virtual archive of sophisticated techniques, designed to dazzle the intellect and delight the eye while distancing the emotions.

Work is currently underway on Tyler's personal inventory site, and he has also commissioned comprehensive virtual archives of Tyler material at such institutions as the National Gallery of Australia.

By installing Dataverse Network software, an institution is able to host multiple individual virtual archives, called "dataverses" for scholars, research groups, or journals, providing a data publication framework that supports author recognition, persistent citation, data discovery and preservation.

Carol Willis, the museum's founding director, said the virtual archive would eventually provide online access to digital reproductions of the 5,000 artifacts in the museum's collection.

Blokwatch is the name of a Belgian newssite, a virtual archive and documentation centre, and meeting point for research on and about the far right in Flanders.

So many of the recipes are reproduced online that a more impecunious cook might well choose to stick with the magazine's virtual archives.

We are taking photographs of each of the Cimabue fragments," he explains, "labeling them and creating a virtual archive of the fragments.

A virtual archive is similar except the documents have no physical presence and seldom have historical value.

For example, Heritage: Civilization and the Jews has been issued as an interactive DVD-ROM, and the internet is the location for a unique "virtual archive" on Jewish women.

For history buffs or Web surfers, the county's virtual archives - online at westchesterarchives.com - offer a fascinating and eclectic mix of documents and photographs.