Remembering the Great War

A bullet-dented tea-can which saved the life of an engineer who repaired a bombing post while under heavy fire in Bullecort in November 1917 is just one of the remarkable items that can be seen online as part of the Great War Archive project at the University.

Other fascinating, but often tragic, items which create a more in-depth understanding of the First World War include a letter to a mother by a soldier who had stumbled across the remains of her son and the diary of a stretcher-bearer in Gallipoli who recorded the deaths of his friends as, one by one, they were killed in action.

The University launched this groundbreaking digitisation project on Armistice Day 2008 to encourage members of the public to capture digitally, then submit, catalogue and assign usage rights to, material they owned originating from the First World War. The response was huge, with 6,500 items submitted and almost 2,000 feeds to an additional Flickr site set up to meet the continuing demand once the date for submissions had passed. Most of these items were previously unseen other than by their owners and, as the First World War moves further away, were at risk of being lost forever. This is the first time that crowd-sourcing has been used to create a digital archive in this area and it has become a model for other projects, with the Oxford team receiving requests for advice on setting up similar initiatives from around the world.

Linked to the Great War Archive is the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, which sees digitised manuscripts, photographs, letters and other memorabilia connected to major British war poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain and Edward Thomas.

Dr Stuart Lee, Director of Computing Services, directed the project, with Kate Lindsay as project manager. ‘The enthusiasm for this project amongst the public showed how the University benefits from reaching out to people not in academia and asking them to participate in our research projects’, said Dr Lee. ‘A great deal of unique material, and also knowledge, is not held in libraries and museums but by members of the public. Through engaging the wider community in digitisation, we can reveal new avenues for research and add to our understanding of key historical events.’

Items were be submitted to the archive online via a purpose-built website. The team also visited libraries and museums around the UK, where members of the public brought in items for on-the-spot digitisation and advice. All submissions were then quality assured by two subject experts.

Included among the items is a souvenir matchbox made by a German POW for a British lance corporal after they had fought a fierce fire together in France, saving many lives. The matchbox is inscribed with the words ‘Souvenir from France / St Omer / Otto Arndt’. There are also remarkable sketches of scenes and characters from military and civilian life by Private Percy Matthews, until now an unknown artist, and nurses’ autograph books from the various military hospitals set up in the UK to treat the wounded. There are complete memoirs written by men who served on the Western Front and further afield in Iraq and Egypt, as well as audio recordings of veterans speaking about their experiences to their families.

The Great War Archive was highly commended in the Times Higher Education Awards in the ‘outstanding ICT initiative of the year’ category and was also highly commended in the UCISA (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association) awards for excellence.

Both archives have been invaluable resources to teachers, academics and researchers, as well as to interested members of the public. In collaboration with the University’s Learning Technologies Group, the project has run a series of workshops for lecturers and teachers. ‘The workshops have supported participants across a wide range of subjects to create resources in the subject area, and also showcased how the online archive and other technologies can be used to enhance teaching and enrich the learning experience’, said Ms Lindsay. ‘They have been incredibly popular. While the archive is a valuable tool for research, by embedding it in school and university curricula, it also becomes a hook to First World War studies: it brings the subject alive.’

The website archive has a specially built educational area for lecturers, teachers, students and lifelong learners. Educators have been thrilled with the resource, some even finding that students are downloading manuscripts of war poets to take home and read for their own interest. Teacher Natalie Usher explained: ‘I love the site and my students love using it – only today I had a Year 13 group using it to research particular forms of writing for our own war wiki on our VLE [Virtual Learning Environment]. A couple of my students became totally engrossed in deciphering Vera Brittain's handwriting and finding out what was next in her letter to Leighton, and they downloaded the letter to take home.’

A key aspect of site usage that the team did not expect was how vital the archive would become in family and local history and genealogy. Since its launch, distant family members who have searched the archive for information on their ancestors have been united. ‘We were inspired to see the response from the general public’, said Ms Lindsay. ‘We have had quite a few requests from people who have used the archive asking us to put them in touch with contributors of specific items. In the archive they have found something that relates to their own family or an aspect of their local community that they are researching. In effect, what the archive has done has made available some of the untold histories and silent voices of the war, all of which are important to understanding this historic event.’

The websites have been made possible through the JISC Digitisation Programme, which will see a wide range of heritage and scholarly resources of national importance shared with new audiences. As it reaches the end of its funding, the project has been given a small funding injection from JISC to train other groups to run community collections in a similar vein.