Great War Digital Archive
Today the Great War Archive opened for submissions. This is a very big and very innovative project started by Oxford University to collect digital facsimiles of documents, photographs, recordings, and artefacts relating to the First World War (it seems to be primarily about the UK but they haven’t explicitly mentioned any geographical limits) from private individuals. This means that lots of family collections which were previously unknown and inaccessible will be made available to the public (and since the terms for contributors state that material will only be used for educational non-commercial purposes I’d hope that access is going to be free). Anyone can contribute material by uploading it through the project’s website, and there will also be special events where people who don’t have the IT skills or equipment can bring items along to have them digitized.
This is a really exciting project, and I hope it all goes well. We’ll be contributing the Wenham letters that I’ve been working on (although I’m still planning to put TEI transcripts on my own site eventually, along with all the same kind of record linkage that I’ve done with Sandall’s history), so I’ll soon be able to report on how easy it is to upload stuff and what kind of metadata they collect.
If everything goes to plan the archive will be open to viewers from 11th November 2008.
Comment by mercurius politicus — 8:31 pm, 3 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
This looks like an interesting project. So much source material for this period must be held in private hands - often unwittingly - that it’s good to try to collate it for all to use. It will be interesting to see the free access point play out, as you say - it would be a shame if it was limited to Athens users or paid for accounts since there are so many amateur historians doing such interesting things for this period.
The one thing that jars with me, ever so slightly, is the language of the website’s front page. I can understand the strapline of “lest we forget” and its objective of preserving the memory of the sacrifices made during the war - particularly in terms of attracting contributors - but it seems to impose a particular interpretation of the war on the archive’s contents. It will be interesting to see whether it contributes more “negative” material about those who perhaps sacrificed less, but were still involved in the conflict ins ome way.
Comment by Brett — 7:45 am, 4 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
What a great idea! If I was being churlish, I’d wonder out aloud why the deadline for submissions is 31 May, and how much material they expect to gather in only 3 months? Oh look, I am being churlish! Well, maybe they can open it up for further submissions in future if the demand (and funding) is there.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 1:02 pm, 4 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
There are plenty of things to be churlish about but I’m going to wait until I’ve tried submitting things. It does seem to be a very short submission period, especially as there was no advance warning that I know of. I only heard about it yesterday - for once a Telegraph story that someone pointed out to me turned out not to be old news or overblown hype! I haven’t even seen them advertising any jobs on jobs.ac.uk, and I’m sure I would have noticed as it’s exactly the kind of thing I’d like to work on. On the other hand I wonder if they might be overwhelmed by submissions, as there’s potentially so much out there, and so much interest in the Great War. They might actually struggle to get it all into shape by 11th November.
I’m not prejudiced but… the interpretation aspect is kind of what I’d expect given that it’s run by the English department and is part of a larger project which focuses on poets. I don’t know whether any empirical military historians have been involved, and it’s surprising that a project like this doesn’t seem to have any links with the Centre for First World War Studies at Birmingham. That could have implications for record linkage as well as more general issues of interpretation. If they don’t have someone on board who knows about service numbers they could be in for some nasty surprises.
It’ll be interesting to see what people on the Great War Forum are saying about this, but I haven’t had time to check it for a couple of weeks.
Comment by Stuart Lee — 1:20 pm, 4 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Dear All,
Thought I’d reply as I am part of the project itself.
first, re the submissiond deadline. We’ve set it at 3 months for now as, if you’ve ever tried to do this, 60% of any project like this involves cataloguing. We may open it up for longer, that depends on how easy it is to keep up with the cataloguing, if not we have given ourselves a get out clause. We are asking people submitting to provide some basic metedata which will hopefully ease the process.
As to the warning, well it’s never that easy. We’ve certainly paper mailed all central public libraries in the UK and ahve been alerting people to this initiative via talks on the wider project. Getting the national media interested is never easy though, until something actually happens or is happening.
As to links with Birmingham, we do have, and ahve been liaising with them about the project. We also have Hew Strachan here at Oxford.
Stuart
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 2:15 pm, 4 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Stuart,
Thanks for commenting. It’s good to know that the Centre for First World War Studies and Hew Strachan are involved. I’d just assumed that they weren’t because I didn’t see any mention of them on the project website.
You’re right that it’s difficult to get the national media interested until something happens. It was just a surprise to me because usually when there’s something in the papers about a big new WWI resource I’ve already heard about it, but in this case I hadn’t. Maybe there’s been something on the Great War Forum in the last 2-3 weeks while I haven’t been reading it, but I don’t remember seeing the project mentioned there before the middle of February.
Can you confirm or deny that access to the finished archive will be free for everyone?
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 5:21 pm, 4 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Actually I’ve just found confirmation that access will be free. Although it’s on the Poetry Archive site not on the Great War Archive it does explicitly refer to the GWA. The project also has a blog but it’s gone unnoticed as it doesn’t link to any other blogs.
Also after some Googling I found that the WFA announced the project on 16th February, so it probably has been common knowledge on the GWF since I’ve been away.
Comment by Stuart Lee — 1:49 pm, 5 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Yes, it will all be for free. This is funded by a governemnt agency (JISC) who fund IT projects. Our main project (as noted) is digitising the manuscripts and war records of the major British poets (we did Owen about 10 years ago). The GWA is another by-rpoduct which originally (ratrher stupidly) we felt would be a minor part, but is actually becoming much bigger. Overall we have two years funding but all the material will be made available for free (worldwide). You can also reuse the material afor educational purposes (as long as you are not attempting to amke money from it). We are committed to keeping it online for 10 years but will obviosuly aim to keep it going much longer than that. All the material will also be archived on Oxford’s servers to help, in part, towards preservation.
We’re also working on teaching packages to surround this aimed at GCSE, A, and undergraduate level (but obviously we hope this will help researchers).
Hope that helps. And please contribute!
Stuart
Comment by Stuart Lee — 1:50 pm, 5 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Excuse the typos - in a bit of a rush and on a bad connection!
Comment by Dan — 1:14 pm, 6 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
I think that there’s a project - not yet online - connected to the AWM to do something for Australian soldiers of the Great War, linking all the material that is accessible to individuals to whom it relates. It’s much easier to do, of course, with a smaller number of servicemen. I saw it being demonstrated in Canberra, but I can’t find details anywhere - will have another search later today
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 1:51 pm, 6 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
I haven’t heard of that but I know that Australia is way ahead of the UK in this respect - they’ve already put service records online free of charge and are doing the same with war diaries. Another advantage they have is that 70% of their personnel files didn’t get destroyed by the Luftwaffe!
Pingback by 12th Military History Carnival « Thoughts on Military History — 1:46 pm, 20 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
[...] about an exciting development in online archiving for the First World War. The posts can be seen here and here. The final post is a series of mine just to show that I have been busy. I have posted [...]