29 March 2015

(W)ARCHIVES: RESCUING TOMMY

March 27, 2015

To mark the centenary of World War I, the United Kingdom’s National Archives has, since last year, been running a fascinating, and addictive (you’ve been warned), website that allows any member of the public to read and contribute to the study of long-neglected records from the Great War.

I refer to “Operation War Diary.” The Archives have digitized and put online an enormous number of war diaries from British tactical units recording the minutiae of their activities in World War I. If you create a free account and go through a ten-minute tutorial, you can then contribute to a crowd-sourced project to tag the records, allowing them to be digitally searchable by future historians.

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