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

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.

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?

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

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.