December to March Project Report

1. Collections
All images have now been received for the major collections and due to an unexpected underspend we are pleased to confirm that we will also be digitising a selection of letters and drafts of In Parenthesis by David Jones. The project is also undergoing discussion with the estates of Edmund Blunden and Ivor Gurney to include a selection from these other two major poets. Negotiations are still underway with the Sassoon Estate.

Agreement has been met with published regarding the inclusion of the full texts of Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves which will be supplied by ProQuest.

On the 3rd March The Great War Archive (http://www.thegreatwararchive.org) was released. This initiative invites members of the General Public to submit digital versions of any items that they hold relating to the Great War to the archive. To date the website has had over 3000 hits and c.3000 submissions.

2. Cataloging and Metadata
80% of the cataloging for the collections outlined in the original proposal has now been completed. QA at the project level has been undertaken and the steering group will be given the opportunity to further QA from the next steering group meeting. Jenifer Dunn, a graduate student at the English Faculty, Oxford, is currently recataloging the original Owen archive to meet the higher level of detail needed by this implementation.

Additionally graduate student Richard Marshall has been employed to assist in the cataloguing of items submitted to the Great War Archive.

3. Project Management
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 website and cataloging interface for The Great War Archive were developed, user tested, and launched on schedule on the 3rd March.

Development has begun on the delivery system for the First World War Poetry Digital Archive and c.900 images with completed metadata have now been migrated to the delivery system.The first round of user testing to test the search interface is scheduled for the end of April. The process is still underway for post processing, renaming, and digitally watermarking received images. This has slipped slightly behind schedule due to illness.


5. Events
As part of the Great War Archive initiative, the project has organised a number of "submission days" over the country. The aim of these days is to invite member of the public who perhaps do not have access to the relevant technology to bring in their items for the project team to digitise and catalogue on their behalf. The two run so far have been immensely successful (Oxford and Norwich) with further planned in Hull, Caermarthen, Edinburgh, Powys and London.

Kate has also presented on the project at the 'Electronic Connections' conference in Edinburgh, and at the JISC Services Committee meeting, where the project was chosen as an exemplary project for the JISC Digitisation Programme.

Further interviews have been recorded and made available on the project website (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/education/podcasts). These include interviews with Gary Sheffield and Richard Holmes and an audio tour of the Imperial War Museum.