Great War Archive update
Yesterday I tried uploading some material to the Great War Archive (which I previously posted about here). I’m pleased to say that it was very easy to do and that the site works very well. It took me less than one hour to upload about 27 items, so about 2 minutes per item, but that would vary depending on how many pages each item has. These were all letters and postcards with only two images per item. Most of the time was spent waiting for the files to upload, which depends on the speed of your connection (my ADSL is 8Mb downstream but only 500Kb upstream). Although there are several pages to click through during the submission process they all load very quickly, and there is an option to remember your personal details so you only have to enter them once.
There’s surprisingly little opportunity to enter structured metadata, but I think the idea is to make the submission process as easy as possible for people with no technical skills. This is likely to be a big advantage – I’ve previously mentioned that the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives requires an unusual combination of skills and experience which probably limits the number of people who can contribute. The important thing with the Great War Archive is to get hold of previously unseen material and make it accessible to the public (access to the archive will definitely be free for everyone). This means not making too many demands on the people who hold this material. It’s important to recognise that even uploading photos can be difficult for some people – many new users on the Great War Forum have problems with this, although that’s partly down to the 100K file size limit. The GWA allows each file to be up to 25MB, which should mean that contributors don’t have to worry about resizing or compressing images.
The submission form asks for as much information as possible in a human readable form. It will then be down to the project staff to convert this into structured metadata. It looks like they have the time, budget and expertise to do this – project director Stuart Lee said in a comment on my previous post that 60% of the timetable is devoted to cataloguing, and that the Centre for First World War Studies is involved in the project. The result should be very different from Ancestry’s sloppy indexing of service records. Now we’ll just have to wait until November to see how it turns out.
Comment by Gavin Robinson — 6:57 pm, 9 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
There seems to be a lot of concern on the Great War Forum about copyright issues. I suspect a lot of that is down to people at the GWF not understanding copyright law very well. In the past I’ve seen some really ludicrous claims and accusations by forum members who clearly have no idea what they’re talking about. But if the GWA is going to succeed the project team will need to do everything they can to clear up these misunderstandings.
Comment by Stuart Lee — 9:44 am, 11 March 2008 [permanent link to this comment]
Gavin,
Many thanks for your kind comment and glad the interface worked well. We’re doing very well with the submissions and yesterday we held an open day in the local library and receieved a further 300 photographs and scans.
Thank you for alerting me to the copyright thread which I will look at. To be honest, most people do not understand this area but we’ve a fair bit of experience in this.
Stuart
Pingback by Investigations of a Dog » Back! — 5:41 pm, 2 March 2009 [permanent link to this comment]
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