Alan lives with his wife, Valerie, and four cats in a house backing onto the South Downs in East Sussex. He holds a comprehensive library of film reference books and magazines as well as several thousand other books. His career was as a civil servant, employed for many years by the Department of Trade as an Examiner in bankruptcy and company liquidation. From the late 1960s, he started to compile a definitive record of world film production since the dawn of cinema. A two-volume work in book form, THE INTERNATIONAL FILM INDEX, was published in 1990. In 1994, an expanded version of this was published in cd-rom format. The title was changed to THE COMPLETE INDEX TO WORLD FILM SINCE 1895 for the next edition of the cd-rom in 1998 and updated versions of the cd-rom were published in 2001 and 2003. The 2003 edition contains information on over 346,000 films. Guinness World records have confirmed that his Index is the world's largest published film database. Information from the database was used to produce two books, THE COMPLETE INDEX TO BRITISH SOUND FILMS SINCE 1928 in 1998 and THE COMPLETE INDEX TO LITERARY SOURCES IN FILM in 1999.