Volunteers needed to help with digitisation of unit war diaries
4 Jun 2014 11:34 AM
Following
the online release of almost 10,000 unit war diaries earlier this
year, we are now conserving, sorting, digitising and itemising thousands more
diaries from the WO 95 series as part of our First World War 100programme
- and we need your help
What's
involved
An important part of the
digitisation of the unit war diaries involves ensuring that the pages within
the diaries are in the correct order, and in some cases within the correct
diary. A team of volunteers helped us complete this work during the first
digitisation project, and we're looking for more volunteers to help us sort
and check the new batch.
Ideally we need volunteers who
can come in to The National Archives for at least one day a fortnight to help
us with this project, which will run between now (June) and September 2014. You
don't need to have volunteered with us before, but it would be helpful if
you've handled original documents and have an interest in the First World
War. We'll provide the training that you need to take part in the project,
as well as the security clearance that you'll need to access staff areas of
the building. We can also reimburse travel expenses (up to £10 per
day).
If you're interested, please
complete our online form - we'll be in touch
soon.
This digitisation project also
means that some diaries will be unavailable in the reading rooms for a short
period of time in the next few months - find out more on our unit war
diaries page.
A different type of
volunteering
If you're interested in
getting involved but can't get to Kew, why not take part in Operation
War Diary? This crowdsourcing 'citizen history' project needs your
help to tag the data within thousands of unit war diaries. You don't need
any experience or knowledge of the diaries to take part, as a simple online
tutorial will help you get started. Visit
the site and start tagging now.