Investigations of a Dog

Over the last week I’ve been exploring the possibilities of Your Archives, the wiki based site set up by the UK National Archives where users can contribute their own knowledge and transcripts of documents. The site has huge possibilities, and so far I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. To start with I’ve been mostly concentrating on First World War records, as the Great War Forum provides both an immediate audience and lots of potential contributors. Getting these people involved could make a very big difference to the project. I think it’s going to take to get a critical mass of GWF regulars using Your Archives regularly, but I’m trying to lead by example. It turns out that I’m not the first forum member to contribute to YA as another member had submitted some information about Labour Corps medal rolls a few months ago. However, that didn’t lead to lots of other people contributing. Can we change that?

As I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, I started by adding a transcript of a report on conditions in Cottbus prisoner of war camp, where my great-grandfather was held in 1917 and 1918. So far one other person has started contributing PoW reports from the same class. These pages are very straightforward as they’re just transcripts of typed reports, although it has been found necessary to play around with the headings sometimes to get the table of contents looking right. There are now 7 of these reports online… out of more than 3,000!

After that I tried something slightly more ambitious. Medal Index Cards, relating to campaign medal entitlements, are available online but are notoriously difficult for novices to interpret. There’s a whole sub-forum at the GWF dedicated to interpreting medal cards, where people can post a card and ask the experts what it means. Your Archives can make this kind of information much more accessible. For example, this is the page I made for my great-grandfather’s medal card. As well as a full transcript of the card itself, I’ve added an explanation of all the information contained on it. The index cards refer to medal rolls which are held at the NA and which can contain more details of a man’s service. Unfortunately the cards only give old references which need to be converted to modern archive references using two key lists in the reading rooms at Kew. Again YA promises to make this easier. I’ve added the medal roll references where I know them and any extra information found on rolls that I’ve looked at. It remains to be seen how far we get with this as there are over 5 million cards. So far I’ve only added 20 and nobody else has taken up the challenge yet.

Battalion war diaries are another very important source for the Great War. Lots of people, either working for regimental museums or on their own account, have transcribed volumes of diaries and put them online, but these aren’t always very easy to find. They’re often posted on the GWF but it would take a lot of searching to find them all. Therefore I’ve started a list of links on Your Archives. This has met with a more immediate response: several people have added to the list, informed me of links to add, or at least said that it’s a good idea.

Overall there hasn’t been as much response from GWF users as I’d hoped, but it’s been reasonably encouraging and we’re still in the early stages. YA is still in beta and doesn’t seem to have a very big user base yet. The recent changes page shows a lot of activity from NA staff adding in-house memoranda, but apart from them I seem to have been the heaviest user in the last week! I think this could be partly down to the fact that I’ve posted about YA in the most appropriate sub-forums for each topic, which happen to be more obscure corners of the forum. It might take time for awareness of YA to filter through to the more “mainstream” areas of the forum. I think the best way to achieve this is to give people tangible demonstrations of how useful YA pages can be. The war diary links page seems to have caught on immediately. If I keep posting links to medal card transcripts in relevant threads then eventually people should get used to the idea and see how useful it can be.

It could be that nobody else has tried to put up a medal card transcript yet because it looks to complicated to them. Although I posted some fairly detailed instructions about how to do it on the forum that might have put some people off because they think it’s more difficult than it actually is. It could also be that the average GWF user is lacking IT skills and confidence with editing wikis. Although I’d assumed that editing a wiki was just like contributing to a forum it might not that be simple. The first person to take up the challenge found it difficult at first and needed some tips to make more progress, but now seems to be entirely comfortable with it. There does seem to be some hostility to Wikipedia on the forum but I’ve been careful to stress that YA is different.

It’s difficult to work out what forum users actually think about YA because very few of them have actually replied to my threads. Several people have said that the war diary links are very useful, but nobody has commented on the medal card transcripts. One person suggested that it was unfair of the NA to expect us to do unpaid work on their website when they make us pay to download document images. Another was worried that linking to war diary transcripts on other sites would make them look more official and give people a false sense that they were complete and correct transcripts when they might not be. A couple of people have questioned whether anyone will actually see the material on YA. It’s impossible to generalise from such a small proportion of forum users. We’ll just have to see what happens.