Download - The First World War Poetry Digital Archive and The Great War Archive

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive

and

The Great War Archive

Kate LindsayOUCS & Faculty of English


The First World War Poetry Digital Archive

• 1996: JISC funded the Virtual Seminars Project

• Drew together primary materials on Wilfred Owen scattered across a

range of archives and an array of contextual resources (WOMDA)

• Web based tutorials to advance the possibilities of traditional teaching

• One of the first multimedia collections designed specifically as a

teaching resource -more than 1 million hits.

• Funding received for Apr 07 - Mar 09 and Oct 08 - Sept 09 to expand

and enhance the archive (JISC Digitisation Programme).


Goals of The First World War

Poetry Digital Archive

1. To make primary source material available to researchers and

students which would otherwise be difficult to access

2. To place the material in context thus widening the site’s appeal to

include history, military history, women studies, and media studies

3. To add value by providing tools for research and education

4. To harvest digital versions of items held by the general public

originating from the First World War.


User Engagement

1. Requirements Gathering and user profiling

• Collected feedback from the the Virtual Seminars Web site

• Survey asking users how they would like to see the Archive expanded

2. Teaching First World War Literature Workshop• What are the learning objectives of existing courses you that you

teach on WW1 literature?• Does this differ to what you think they should they be? If so how?• Should we be teaching courses on War Literature/Poetry or just First

World War Literature/Poetry?• Do the canonical poets truly reflect the attitudes at the time to the

War?• What other “literatures” should we look to include (e.g. drama, film,

audio, trench literature, etc.)?• Are there any practical problems in extending the canon?

3. User-based steering group


User Engagement

4. Project web site

• Image taster blogs

• Pre release of educational materials

5. Community Building• Google discussion groups• FB Group• Twitter ‘On this day’

6. Two extensive user testing periods with real users

7. Series of creating First World War Teaching Materials Workshops for teachers and lecturers


Technicalities

• Images digitised as TIFFs and delivered as JPGs, Audio as MP3,

Video as MPEG 4

• Catalogued using Extensis Portfolio

• Images digitally watermarked using DigiMark

• Off the shelf CMS: CONTENTdm

• Own build web front-end in Ruby on Rails, CSS, XHTML

• Path Creation Tool: RESTful web application


The Archive’s Collections

• c. 4700 digital images of primary source material (manuscripts,

letters, service records) from major British WW1 poets.

• Online corpora of the full-texts of

the poems.

• c. 500 Multimedia objects (photographs,

audio and video) from the IWM.

• Publications of War (recruitment

posters, trench papers etc.)

• All freely accessible for educational use

under the JISC/HEFCE Model license


The Great War Archive Initiative

• Run between March 08 and June 08.

• A ‘Community Collection’ to harvest

digital versions of items originating

from the Great War held by members of

the general public.

• Aim: To create a digital collection of

worth at low cost by negating the need

for institutional digitisation and

metadata creation.

• Targeted specifically at genealogists,

military collectors and enthusiasts, and

the elderly.


The Great War Archive Initiative:

Submission Website

• Simple submission process, no need for

registration.

• Contributors asked to agree to basic

terms and conditions of the JISC/HEFCE

Model license.

• Enter basic metadata and attach files /

enter a story.


The Great War Archive:

Submission Days• A roadshow to offer on the spot digitisation and advice.

• Held at libraries, museums and archives

across the country.

• A submission day pack was made

available for organisations who wished

to perform their own event.


The Great War Archive Initiative: Outputs

• Over 6500 items collected.

• Only 1 item rejected.

• Costs came in at c. £3.50 per image

BUT we did perform digitisation on

items posted to us (we didn’t have the

heart to say no!).

• Highly commended for the THE Awards

and UCISA Award for Excellence.

• Submission software (CoCoCo) released

to the open source community.

• A Flickr Group continues to collect

items.


2009 Objectives

To provide a platform upon which users can:

– participate in the creation of content - timelines, paths, googlemaps, mindmaps……

– Visualise data in new and interesting ways and in doing so come to new understandings

– Form new narratives on the archival content within a community