Operation War Diary is a wonderful example of how an institution can collaborate with the public in a meaningful way and accomplish something quite extraordinary in the process. I haven’t had the opportunity to tag as many diary pages as I wanted but I enjoyed contributing a few hours to the project. I’m eagerly looking forward to the launch of Lives of the First World War!
We have gathered together the statistics for the first week of Operation War Diary – Tues 14th Jan – Mon 20 Jan. Citizen Historians are already making an extraordinary contribution to what we know about the First World War. Our team are analysing the data, preparing it for its 3 main purposes:
- to provide evidence about the experience of named individuals in IWM’s Lives of the First World War project – you are contributing to their permanent digital memorial
- to present academics with large amounts of accurate data to help them gain a better understanding of how the war was fought
- to enrich The National Archives’ catalogue descriptions for the unit war diaries – this will enable you and others to find what they want in those 1.5 million pages, in future
The data itself is rich and complex, so it’s going to take a while for us to complete…
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Categories: Operation War Diary, Researching
Doing Our Bit 