Investigations of a Dog

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.

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.