October/November Project Report

1. Collections
The majority of the images have now been received for the major collections with the exception materials held in New York. There has been an unexpected underspend on digitisation and the project is now further investigation other collections to be included within the archive, including Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden. The project has recruited Alun Edwards as a RA for 1/2 a week to assist in the scoping of further collections.

2. Cataloging and Metadata
The project has recruited Alisa Miller as a part-time cataloger on the project to assist in generating metadata for the digital objects. To date nearly 800 objects have been cataloged. Some metadata fields have been adjusted and expanded to address the intricaces of the material we are cataloging.

3. Project Management
The progress report was submitted to JISC and signed off. The report can be found on the project website at:

Apart from the additional staffing mentioned above Rich Doe has been employed as the web developer for the archive. Rich has previously worked on a variety of other technical workpackages for the project and will take the lead in the development of the final delivery system.

In October the team held a meeting to plan the community collection ("The Great War Archive") workflow and marketing strategy. It has been decided to promote the collection primarily via county and public libraries, holding institutions, the media, and a select few other organisations (The Western Front Association, The IWM and the In Flanders Fields Museum, Belgium). A press release has been drawn up and will be available on the website shortly. The community collection will be released on the 3rd March 2008 for an initial period of 3 months.

4. Technical Development
The process is underway for post processing, renaming and digitally watermarking received images.

A virtual development server has been purchased for the development period of the project from Oxford University's Network Solutions Systems. After the period of funding ends the project will be transfered onto shared webspace.

The old tutorials that were in the Virtual Seminars website have been converted to compliant XHTML by Rich Doe and redesigned to fit with the look and feel of the new archive. These will be made available on the project website before Christmas.

Images with completed metadata have now started to be uploaded to CONTENTdm for final delivery and work will start on the design of the archive and the static web pages that surround it in January 2008.

5. Events
In November the project ran a workshop entitled 'Teaching WW1 Literature'. The event was attended by 25 teachers and lecturers of First World War literature with speakers including Jon Stallworthy, Vivien Noaks and Guy Cuthbertson. Topics covered included methods of teaching the literature of the First World War, broadening the canon of First World War literature and the place of First World War literature within the wider context of War literature. The project team used the event as a requirements gathering exercise for the development of accompanying educational resources for the archive and presented the project to the group. All talks were recorded and will be made available as podcasts on the website in December.

Also during November Stuart and Kate attended the 'Dead Reckoning Passchendaele 1917 Conference' in Leper, Belgium. Contacts were made with variety of sources including the In Flanders Fields Museum who the project will work with promote the Great War Archive and the First World War Poetry Digital Archive.

Kate also attended the 'Books on the Battlefield' conference at the university of York and recorded a selection of talks for podcast delivery. Both Everett and Kate gave talks at conferences to promote the project, and further interviews with experts on the Great War have been sourced to include on the webpage, including military historian Gary Sheffield and Richard Holmes.