This week the UK National Archives announced that they will be closing the Your Archives wiki in September 2012. Existing content will be preserved as HTML snapshots and kept available on the government web archive, but it won’t be running on MediaWiki so search, edit and export won’t work. Along with TNA’s other online resources, Your Archives will be replaced by the new Discovery service (now in beta), which will integrate the Catalogue, DocumentsOnline and user-created content, along with a powerful search engine and an API so that third parties can query the data (so no more need for Python scripts to scrape data out of the HTML). It’s not yet clear exactly what kind of content they will and won’t let us add, and I suspect that the scope will be narrower than Your Archives, but better integration should make up for that. One of the biggest problems with Your Archives was that getting incoming links from the Catalogue was very clunky and getting incoming links from DocumentsOnline was impossible (so people browsing DocumentsOnline had no easy way of knowing if a transcript of the document was available). This was a limitation of the Catalogue and DocumentsOnline as much as a limitation of MediaWiki, but in any case it’s good that they’ve solved it.

The announcement claims that ‘online technologies have changed rapidly in that time, and the expectations of our users have also changed’ but I’d say it’s more that TNA’s attitude to user-created content has changed. Back in 2007 they still seemed to be suspicious of it and had to keep it quarantined away from their official website. Now they want to bring it into the catalogue so that everyone can find it more easily. I think Your Archives must have played a part in bringing about that change of policy by showing that user-created content is nothing to be scared of, and that closer integration of all TNA online resources is absolutely necessary. If that’s the case then Your Archives has been a successful experiment. TNA also seem to be getting better at open access and re-usability. In 2007 I complained that the terms of use were too restrictive because they didn’t allow re-use of content, but now they seem to be moving towards putting material under the Open Government Licence, which is pretty much the same as a Creative Commons attribution licence (see draft terms of use for the new service).

I’ve been contributing to Your Archives on and off for over four years. According to the log of my contributions, the first page I created was a transcript of a prisoner of war report on 27 October 2007. Up to now I’ve made 3,410 edits, including creating the third most popular page (which has had over 80,000 views – my ‘proper’ academic publications will never be that widely read). Now as a community moderator I’ll be helping to manage the transition by tidying up existing content and ensuring that it will be as accessible as possible in the archived snapshot version. I’ll also be exploring the possibilities of MediaWiki outside Your Archives. It’s still an immensely powerful and useful piece of software. I used it to draft my book and it worked really well for that, which shows that wiki doesn’t have to mean letting just anyone edit, or even any kind of collaboration at all. I really want to find out how to use Semantic MediaWiki and what it can do. It is kind of sad that Your Archives is coming to an end, but that’s just sentimentality. If things don’t change they’ll stay as they are, and who’d want that?

This week was the anniversary of the 1964 riots when mods fought rockers in various seaside towns. Over at Your Archives you can read a summary of a file of Home Office papers relating to the riots. But what were mods and rockers? The file helpfully defines mods as “riders of motor scooters with somewhat fanciful sartorial styles”, and rockers as “riders of motor cycles who dress in leather jerkins and heavy boots”. It’s interesting that only 20% of the rioters were thought to have arrived on bikes and scooters, and that the majority went by train. And it wasn’t just Brighton: even Skegness had some trouble!  What isn’t surprising is the knee-jerk reaction of some politicians and police officers who seemed to think that civilisation was under threat and that drastic measures like  national service, judicial corporal punishment, and confiscating driving licences for non-motoring offences were necessary. What does seem surprising today is that the government dismissed these suggestions as impractical and insisted (correctly, as it turned out) that the situation was under control and could be dealt with by existing police powers. I imagine that if this had happened in the last 10 years, the Labour government would have responded over-enthusiastically to the demands that Something Must Be Done, with “tough” new measures that created new problems without solving the illusory problems that they were supposed to solve. It remains to be seen if things will be different now. As for the mods and rockers, they didn’t destroy civilisation. In the 1970s modernism turned into revivalism. I still think “mod revival” is an oxymoron, although Secret Affair are one of my guilty pleasures. The Home Office files even mention a mod falling off a cliff which was possibly the inspiration for the end of Quadrophenia.

Knowing how to program can save you from tedious repetitive tasks, such as inserting templates into a wiki page. Recently I’ve been spending more time editing the UK National Archives wiki Your Archives. I created a category for women’s wills, and while I was adding pages to it, I found that a lot of them didn’t have the correct template. Wills that were proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury are held by the National Archives and can be downloaded from their DocumentsOnline service. Transcripts of these wills can be posted on Your Archives, and we have a template for them which automatically creates a link back to DocumentsOnline based on an ID code, and formats some key data (testator’s name, dates, catalogue reference) in a standard form. Most of the data which goes into the template can be found in the DocumentsOnline index. We used to copy and paste each value manually, which was not the best use of a human’s time. Faced with the prospect of doing this an awful lot, I decided to write a program to do it automatically. First I threw together a Python script, which was alright for me but no use for people who don’t have Python and BeautifulSoup (and I also wrote it in such a way that it relied on Linux with xclip installed). So then I decided to rewrite it in JavaScript, so that other people could use it in their browsers. You can find the finished version and documentation on the PCC Will Bookmarklet page. Below is a walk through of how I did it.

I’ve tried to make this guide fairly accessible, but I haven’t explained everything. You should be able to follow it if you’re familiar with The Programming Historian. Adam Crymble’s How To Write A Zotero Translator also has some useful tips on scraping with JavaScript, but be aware that it uses XPath, which won’t work in Internet Explorer.

Browsers can run JavaScript programs in several ways. The code might be embedded in a web page, or part of a Firefox extension. You can also run JavaScript from the address bar by typing javascript: followed by some code, and you can save code in the address of a bookmark in the same format. Then when you click on the bookmark, the code runs on the current page. This makes it easy to write and run a script which scrapes data from a page and does something useful with it. Bookmarks which run a script are usually known as bookmarklets.

To write and test a bookmarklet it’s a good idea to install the Firefox extension Firebug. This does two things that are really useful. First, it helps to analyse the underlying code of a web page and find the elements containing the data you’re interested in. Second, it has a command line which can run and debug JavaScript. Making a bookmarklet without Firebug is possible, but much more difficult than it needs to be.

As an example I’m going to refer to the will of Sarah Rawlinson, who was the widow of saddler Nathaniel Rawlinson. This will has a transcript on Your Archives and an index entry on DocumentsOnline. The source code of the Your Archives wiki page includes this template:

{{PCCWill
|Piece=PROB 11/317
|Testator=Sarah Rawlinson, Widow of London
|Signed=1 September 1665
|Proved=30 September 1665
|Code=825891}}

The signed date has to be read by a human from the text of the will (you can see from the text of the wiki page that it’s not in a very machine readable form!). All other data can be scraped from the DocumentsOnline page. By viewing the source code of the page we can find which HTML elements contain the facts that we’re interested in. The data is arranged in a table, which is the fifth table element on the page. The table has two columns. The first contains th elements with the field name, and the second contains td elements with the actual data. Knowing this we can use DOM (a representation of HTML elements in JavaScript objects) to pull out what we want and put it into a variable:

var a=document.getElementsByTagName('table')[4].getElementsByTagName('td');

The variable a now contains a sequence of objects representing all of the td elements in the fifth table element. We can use this later to get the values for the testator’s name, the date the will was proved, and the catalogue reference.

The Code parameter in the template is a unique id number for documents on DocumentsOnline. It can be found in the query string in the URL of the page, after Edoc_Id=. The easiest way to get it is to run a regular expression over the URL to match “Edoc_Id=” followed by a series of digits and then select the digits as a group.

var b=window.location.href.match(/Edoc_Id=([0-9]+)/)[1];

The variable b now contains the code number. The template will use this to construct a link from Your Archives to DocumentsOnline.

Since the date the will was signed isn’t shown on the DocumentsOnline page, users have to enter it manually. The basic version of the bookmarklet just ignores this value, leaving users to enter it in the template in the wiki edit box. This is generally faster and less annoying if you know how to use wiki templates. For people who are less confident with entering parameters directly into a template, I made an extra version of the script, which prompts the user to enter the signed date. Fortunately JavaScript has a simple function which displays a prompt box and returns the entered value.

var c=prompt('Please enter date signed (leave blank if unknown):','');

Now the variable c contains the date the will was signed (or nothing if nothing was entered).

From April 1653 to June 1660 the Prerogative Court of Canterbury and all other ecclesiastical probate courts were replaced by the secular Court for Probate of Wills. Your Archives has a separate template for this court called CPWWill. It has all the same parameters as PCCWill but displays different text. CPW wills are held in the same class as PCC wills and are also available on DocumentsOnline in the same way. The DocumentsOnline index treats them all as PCC wills, but we can easily tell the difference by checking the date that a will was proved. JavaScript has a date object which can turn a string into a date and do calculations on it. Luckily the text from DocumentsOnline is in a format which can be automatically converted, so we just need to pull it out and pass it to the constructor of a new date object. Then we can compare it with other dates.

var pr=new Date(a[1].innerHTML);

The variable pr is the date the will was proved. We get this by going back to variable a, which contains all of the data cells from the fifth table, and stepping to the second cell in the sequence, and using innerHTML to pull out all of its text content. Then the text is converted into a date object which we can compare with other dates.

var bf=new Date('1653/4/7');
var af=new Date('1660/7/3');

The variables bf (before) and af (after) are the dates we need to compare with. The CPW was created by an ordinance of parliament passed on 8 April 1653, so it can’t have proved any wills before this date. After the Restoration, the PCC began sitting again on 3 July 1660, so the CPW can’t have proved any wills on or after this date. Therefore if the date of probate is between these dates it must be a CPW will, and if it isn’t it must be a PCC will.

if (pr>bf && pr<af){var t='CPW';}
else {var t='PCC';}

The variable t now contains a string for the type of will (PCC or CPW) which will be used to generate the correct template name. The if test compares the dates and assigns the correct value to t.

Now we have all the data we need to create the template. We just have to put it all together. I did this in one long complicated statement:

var x='<textarea rows="15" cols="40">{{' + t + 'Will\n|Piece=' + a[2].innerHTML.match(/>(.+)<img/i)[1] + '\n|Testator=' + a[0].innerHTML.slice(8).replace(' ',' ').replace(' ,', ',') + '\n|Signed=' + c + '\n|Proved=' + a[1].innerHTML+'\n|Code='+b+'}}</textarea>';

The overall effect is to end up with a variable called x containing a string with all of the template code in it, which can be written to a window and pasted into the wiki. We use the + operator to concatenate several literal strings and string variables.

The string starts with the HTML textarea element. This will help to display the text to the user and allow them to copy it.

onFocus="this.select()" will make the text in the text area select itself when clicked, which should speed up copying and pasting (except in Safari where it immediately deselects itself for some reason!).

The default content of the textarea is the wiki template with all the data inserted into it. By adding the variable t we get the correct template: it will either start with {{PCCWill or {{CPWWill.

\n adds new lines, which will make the template code more readable.

Next we add the Piece parameter and its value. This is the catalogue reference from the third row in the table. This cell is in a[2], that is the third element in the sequence stored in variable a. We can’t just use innerHTML to get the text because the cell also contains an image. Therefore we have to use a regular expression to find the text which comes between the opening td tag and the img tag:

a[2].innerHTML.match(/>(.+)<img/i)[1]

The i after the regular expression makes it case insensitive, which is necessary because Internet Explorer inexplicably forces HTML source code to upper case even if it was originally in lower case (as XHTML should be).

The testator’s name is in the first row of the table. Again we can’t just use innerHTML to get the text because the value in the cell always starts with “Will of” and we don’t want that. But since the pattern is so predictable, we can just slice off the first 8 characters of the string, which will leave us with the name and other details. For some reason this cell often contains superfluous spaces too, but these are easily removed with the replace() function, replacing two spaces with one, then replacing a space followed by a comma with just a comma:

a[0].innerHTML.slice(8).replace(' ',' ').replace(' ,', ',')

Compared to the previous values, getting the date proved is easy. In this case we can just use innerHTML to get all of the text out of the cell, which is in a[1] because it’s the second row of the table:

a[1].innerHTML

The Code parameter is even easier because we already have exactly what we need stored in variable b.

Now we just need to output the result so that the user can do something with it. First we open a new pop-up window:

var w=window.open('', 'DO', 'height=400,width=500,resizable=1,scrollbars=1');]

Now we can access this window through the variable w. So we can write the contents of variable x (which is the string containing the textarea element and the template text) to the document in window w:

w.document.write(x);
w.document.close();

Closing the document isn’t essential but it makes things look neater as otherwise it would give the user the false impression that the window hadn’t finished loading.

Finally the script needs to be converted into bookmarklet form. This involves putting it all onto one line, taking out any unnecessary spaces, and encoding certain special characters which aren’t allowed in URLs. Browsers aren’t always very strict and will let you get away with a lot of these characters if you put the script directly into the address bar or paste it into the properties of an existing bookmark. But if you want to embed it in a web page so that users can drag it onto their toolbar, you will need to encode some characters which would be misinterpreted. In the finished script I substituted > with %3E and < with %3C. Strictly speaking, & should be replaced with %26 and spaces should be replaced with %20, among other things, but everything seems to work as it is. Too much encoding can unnecessarily increase the length of the script. When designing your own bookmarklets it’s important to remember that there is usually a limit of 2,000 characters. This is why I’ve used short and not very meaningful variable names.

Once the code is finished it can be put into the href attribute of an <a> tag on any HTML page. Users can then drag and drop the link or right click on it to save it in their browsers. Before releasing it to the public you should test it on different browsers to make sure that it works as expected. Internet Explorer is usually the one that causes the most problems.

So to finish, here is the PCC Will bookmarklet.

There has been some bad news for historians recently: the RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History has lost its direct government funding and is being privatised in a move disturbingly reminiscent of PFI (and to add insult to injury the IHR claims to be “delighted” about this!); the UK National Archives (or PRO to most of us who use it) can no longer afford to open on Mondays or offer free parking.

But it’s not all bad. There’s also some good news from the National Archives which has got much less attention than the bad news – in fact I’m not even sure exactly when it happened. They are now allowing and encouraging users to upload photos of public records held at Kew to Flickr and similar photo sharing sites. Crown Copyright had already been waived to allow republication of the text of public records but previously publishing images of documents didn’t appear to be allowed. Now it’s confirmed that uploading images to Flickr is allowed (provided that you’ve taken them yourself – this doesn’t cover documents bought from DocumentsOnline or Ancestry). This is a win situation for everyone, because these documents will be made freely available without it costing the archives anything – a major advantage when budgets and funding are being cut drastically.

The NA has its own Flickr account, and a group for visitors. Combined with the Your Archives wiki this could lead to some really exciting stuff. Some people are already using Flickr and Your Archives to publish Metropolitan Police leavers’ registers. The possibilities are endless. I’m certainly going to upload all the photos I take in the course of my research. To start with I’ve put up the service record of my ancestor Tom Wenham from the First World War (photographed from the screen of a microfilm reader).

Still to come are some indemnity cases from SP24, and sooner or later I’ll have loads of SP28 to share. It would be fantastic if other archives would do this too, although some will probably be too conservative to try it. The British Library still doesn’t allow digital cameras, which just makes me not want to bother with BL manuscripts.

The UK National Archives (or PRO if you’re old-skool like me) has announced a new project called Digital Microfilm. This involves scanning existing microfilms of original documents and making the whole reel available as a single (very big!) PDF file. These files are free to download. The aim is to eventually digitize all the microfilm records held by TNA/PRO and get rid of the microfilm readers at Kew. I think this a great idea as it’s a quick and easy way of making these records more widely available without the time and cost involved in indexing individual documents. Users can post their own indexes and transcripts on the Your Archives wiki. Although the quality of the scans obviously won’t be any better than the microfilm that they came from (and I know from experience that full colour high-resolution digital photos are much easier to work with) PDFs will still be more convenient than using a microfilm reader – no more holding a camera up to the screen to get a copy of the microfilm! I’m not sure whether this project will include records that have already been (badly) indexed and made available through DocumentsOnline and Ancestry, such as WWI service records and medal cards, but I assume records which aren’t currently available anywhere online will be the highest priority.

Way back in October 2006 (when this blog was all shiny and new) I wrote about female saddlers in London during the English Civil War. My work on saddlers and harness makers (male as well as female) is quite open-ended. I don’t know exactly where I’m going with it, so I’m just tying to find out as much as I can about these individuals and their families when I get the chance. A while ago I searched the records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury for wills of people I was interested in. These are available through DocumentsOnline, but I found it cheaper to print out copies while I was at the PRO (20p per sheet as opposed to £3.50 per will). I didn’t find a will for everyone (some might have had their wills proved in other courts) but I came up with a lot of hits. Recently I finally got round to transcribing them (which was good palaeography practice) and publishing the transcripts on Your Archives.

Although wills tend to come in a standard form, that structure can contain a lot of variety. They can tell us about people’s wealth, business activities, and families, and contain all kinds of incidental details which shed some light on their lives. Below is a selection of some of the more interesting things I found, with links to the full transcripts.

First of all, another possible female saddler. Sarah Rawlinson was the widow of Nathaniel Rawlinson, who had some huge contracts to supply the New Model Army. I haven’t found a will for him yet, but Sarah’s will says that he left her all his estate. So far I don’t know whether she carried on running the business.

Most saddlers seem to have had good relationships with their wives. It’s not unusual for a testator to name his wife as sole executrix and leave her the residue of his estate. Not William Deacon. He instructed his executors to make sure that his wife didn’t embezzle anything from his estate and to deny her any legacies other than her customary widow’s third if she didn’t co-operate!

William Chevall left only one shilling to his niece, saying that he would have left her more if she hadn’t got married without his permission!

Thomas Harrison, who lived in the parish of St Botolph’s Aldgate, wasn’t a major player in supplying armies with saddles during the First Civil War, but he was very wealthy. His will shows that in 1650 he had shares in two ships, and was due £700 for one of them. He had loaned £300 to parliament to support the war effort, and left £100 towards his own funeral expenses. He also seems to have had a feckless son-in-law. This is the only saddler’s will I’ve come across which actually mentions saddles.

The Pease family were well known in the saddlery trade. William senior and William junior both became master of the London Saddlers Company. They also controlled a property empire in London and the surrounding counties, so their saddlery business might not even have been their largest source of income. William senior had nine children at the time he made his will, and divided his freehold, copiehold, and leasehold lands between his daughters as well as his sons. Many testators were confident of their own salvation, but William junior was more confident than most, expecting “a crowne of glory in the Kingdome of Heaven amongst the elect”.

John Munnings, one of the biggest harness makers, was unusual in that he didn’t bother commending his soul to god at the start of his will. He divided most of his estate, including leases on various property, between his wife and daughter.

Richard Beighton‘s will reveals that he was born in Warwickshire, something which would be almost impossible to find out from other sources. He also held lands in Middlesex and Hertfordshire, and had a cousin called Alice Cooper.

Nicholas Collard wasn’t a saddler but his complete will happened to be on the same page as one that I was interested in so I transcribed it anyway. He died in debt and his executors refused to carry out their duties, so administration was granted to his chief creditor instead. (I’m quite pleased with myself for understanding enough Latin to work that bit out.)

Do academic historians or PRO staff have a better knowledge of the public records? For records of the civil wars I suspect that academics have the upper hand. SP28 is not very well catalogued and sorted. Only researchers who have spent years working on it really know what’s there, and even now the source hasn’t been used to its full potential. Things are different with records of First World War soldiers. Amateur researchers seem to know far more about these than either academics or archive staff.

PRO/NA staff are increasingly aware that other people know more about their records than they do. One way they have responded is by launching Your Archives, a website running on wiki technology which allows anyone who has specialist knowledge of archival sources in the UK to contribute what they know. The site first opened to the public in spring 2007 and has continued to grow since then. I first started using it in October, and I’ve noticed an increase in activity in recent months. As well as the First World War stuff that I mentioned before, I’ve created a British Civil Wars category and started to populate it with my PhD notes, mostly taken from SP28.

There’s far more information that could be added, by me and by other people. Although contributions have been steadily increasing the number of regular contributors is still relatively small. I managed to encourage a few people from the Great War Forum to get involved, but not very many. Maybe one of the problems is that contributors need an unusual combination of specialist knowledge of archives, IT skills, and confidence with Web 2.0 ways of thinking. Or maybe Wikipedia has given all wikis a bad name that they don’t deserve.

If anyone who is reading this has relevant knowledge of PRO documents but hasn’t contributed to Your Archives, what would make you more likely to contribute?

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.

Your Archives is a wiki based site launched by the UK National Archives which allows users to contribute information and about, and transcripts of, documents held by the NA (and also information to supplement the National Register of Archives). Despite being excited about the possibilities of the site, I’ve been too busy to actually get involved. But today I finally registered and started contributing. I’m pleased to say that the terms of use now make it clear that restrictions on re-use of content don’t apply to transcripts of documents which are covered by waiver of Crown Copyright, and don’t apply to fair dealing under UK copyright law.

To start with I put up a transcript of a report on prisoner of war camps in the First World War, which you can see here. My first impression is that the site is very easy to use. Anyone who can use a web forum or a blog shouldn’t have any problems with it. The help pages are still very basic and there’s no style guide, but the easiest way to work out how to do things is to look at existing pages for examples.

I’ll be adding more contributions whenever I have time, and I’m also trying to encourage other people to contribute. I’ve posted on the Great War Forum asking people there to get involved. Between them forum members have a huge amount of relevant knowledge which needs to be more accessible. There have been some concerns raised on the forum that information is increasingly hard to find there because there’s so much of it. Your Archives could help to improve this situation, at least for the information which is within its remit, as a wiki based site would make the content much more accessible than a forum. It remains to be seen how many people will actually get involved. And if you’re reading this post and have any knowledge about TNA/PRO documents or other UK archives, go and sign up! Now!