First World War Digital Commemoration Roundtable

First World War digital commemoration roundtable

ImperialWarMuseum, 27 March 2012

Event notes (full version)

Michelle Pauli

Diane Lees, director of IWM (Imperial War Museums)

David Cameron has appointed Dr Andrew Murrison, MP, a special representative who is currently drafting a report for both David Cameron and Jeremy Hunt to see how the nation will commemorate the occasion. He has brought together a Core Liaison Group with representations from governental departments, IWM, HLF etc so that connections across government can be made. They will come up with a statement for Remembrance Day this year. That’s the timetable. We need a national framework under which all of our programmes sit. We hope there will be a coming together to bring the disparate elements together. I hope the work we do will feed up and feed down so we can see the benefits of us all working together.

Lots has happened over the year but by November we'll have a better sense of where we are going and what we are trying to achieve and our shared outputs and legacy. We are encouraging government to think globally, and about where all of our projects do have real impact. And to think about real concrete legacy from the programme. We can build in new partnership models, a digital strategy, a clearer idea of the way we can work effectively together. I'm really delighted about how people have responded to the call. At the end the nation, will appreciate it, one and all.

2. Catherine Grout, JISC

I'd like to note and reflect on what has happened in past year and mention programmes such as Culture 24, IWM, BBC – those who have really taken this forward.

This meeting is an opportunity to stand back and reflect on all the activities we've been planning. A number of projects have started and funding and effort has been put in but it is possible to miss opportunities to knit things together. We have a huge opportunity to do that and to think about the legacy. This is firstly the legacy for the audience for the audience we serve but also a legacy for how we work together and think creatively about how we join together some of our projects. How we unleash our content and reach new audiences. The benefit is not only within the framework of the collaboration but beyond that, all our organisations can benefit in the longer term.

It might be quite a challenge. There's a lot of information to absorb. Today we have factored in some thinking time in small groups when we can plan some of these connections, and a crucial step at the end to see where we are – the next steps. Also, we need to look at how we feed up into the government group. There's a challenge at government level, a few different departments are interested in the process so there's an opportunity to feed into that.

3. Sarah Fahmy, JISC

JISC is interested in the centenary because it sees the first world war as not only of huge international significance but also a theme through which we can answer some of the issues around managing digital content – technical issues, strategic issues.

The strategic issues around the academic appraisal of first world war commemoration will be very important - how will it interact with the public and the wider educational community and how do we represent that technologically?

It's also about understanding and gathering evidence about legal, economic and technical barriers. We are pinning this to a theme of national significance, providing coordination and sharing expertise to leverage maximum impact. How do we want to be able to look back on this in 2020 – what was the impact of the public money put in? It will be powerful to be able to give that message.

We also have a digital agenda. We are interested in open data, open metadata, it's all part of our Discovery programme. It is also about how we measure impact and tackle digital literacy. The collection days Europeana is running – these really popular and we are interested to see if it would it be possible to tag our work on to it as well.

There are also wider policy issues – public engagement with academia, national identity and citizenship, social inclusion and legacy.

4. JISC First World War Discovery Programme (Patricia Methven, KCL)

We were commissioned with King's department of war studies to undertake a three month scoping project on academic requirements. The specifics for us to survey included the availability of resources relating to the first world war, how HE and FE is served in teaching, identifying trends and providing expert academic guidance to gather it in – what were their needs and what did they think was important. We also provided a priority list of available digital resources for a new JISC aggregation website, meeting relevance and accessibility. We thought we should also be commenting on resources not yet digitised but that wasn't the priority for the project.

We had strong academic steering committee led by our professor of the history of war. There were also film, psychiatry, medicine experts etc, not all from King's and an able project team. We had four focus groups comprising archivists, librarians and academics across subject disciplines.

Outcomes are: a report summarising our findings; spreadsheet listing institutions holding first world war related material; priority list of digital resources for aggregation; database to collect data on digital and hard copy resources on an ongoing basis.

Findings show that brand recognition is important. When asked what sources they use, academics would almost always start with IWM. Jorum has a significant body of cleared material and is barely used. However, they also talked about the impact of disappointed searched / retrieval expectations – issues of provenance, worries about website sustainability and persistence ("this is something else you can look at but be wary").

Usability was critical. The National Archive business model was disliked as it militates against socio-demographic and epidemiological research – it is model based on the needs of family historians. There are quantities of information which has been digitised but is sitting on CDs, drives etc. IPR issues were typically cited as technological barriers, and the paucity of digitised print material over visual including maps and stats.

There was a dislike of community-sourced projects. It was felt that these tend to be cherry picked resources with not necessarily reliable provenances – they may not tell whole story.

Some stats from the archivists/librarians:

52.2% of respondents have digital material cleared for not-for-profit use

67.2% require an institutional subscription

Only 15% of First World War digitised content is aggregated with content from other resources

There is a lot of stuff out there but it is very scattered and not necessarily very available.

The top three First World War themes are:

War experience

Memory

Social and cultural experience of war

In the medical field, shell shock is emphasised over everything else. It was felt that there is a correlation between existing teaching and available teaching resources and this is seen as a limiting factor. There is a major concern about the emphasis of trench experience and western front over everything else – get us out of the trenches!

There were few examples of active engagement with digital materials in teaching – images were mainly used in powerpoint – and a lack of time was cited. Digitised poetry is the major exception to that.

Unmet needs include the global experience of war, naval history, multi-theatre operations, nursing and medicine, literature and colonial experience and impact, class, gender, employment, temperance, regions of UK, religions and faith, plastic surgery. These are all seen as unmet areas for research. It was felt that print digitisation should be prioritised over other types of material.

There are challenges to capture sources for current scholarship: what are we doing today, what does it say about us, why is it still all about poetry and trenches in school? There is tons of stuff out there but it is not very reliable, they do not have resources to sort it out. The stuff they do want to use is not readily accessible.

The technical findings were that few institutions have APIs; not recreating silos of data is important – academics wanted to be able to mix data together and to do that you need to get the metadata right; consistency is very important along with speed as very few have time to go back and do masses of new digital research and so they like to point students to same resources that are updated so consistent URLs are important. Free to use as much as possible. Consistent runs instead of cherry picking. Wide array of different images important but the long runs of print eg training manuals etc are crucial, losing the context is eh fear of the digital work. Overload is a factor too. Lack of institutional support is a factor – there is little institutional support for advanced classroom technology.

5. World War One Centenary: Continuations and Beginnings (Kate Lindsay, OUCS, University of Oxford)

The project is made up of the team that produced the Great War Archive, the first world war poetry archive, Runcoco, and comes from the Open Spires initiative where we have nearly 2,000 podcasts online from academics.

This project is based on template of Politics in Spires which got academics blogging etc.

The project aims to create open educational resources (OER) around the first world war which will be relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning and have a global perspective. It will support the creation of a suite of learning and teaching resources and embed and capture lessons learnt.

A creative commons licence - CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 – was chosen because it is the one used at Oxford for all open content. It meets the needs and engages most academics.

OER is about finding material that exists on the web, pulling it into open resource and making it available for everyone to use for free. All material must be available under open licences.

WHY? It saves time, it enhances knowledge in the community about the first world war, people can customise their learning experiences, it widens access to the work of leading institutions, it allows people to use, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute material without having to ask permission.

We are looking to include big OER but also smaller OER such as video lecture series on the web, lots of podcasts, also very granular OER (eg the stuff that people want to use in their powerpoint – images and maps etc)

It is only a six-month project so we won’t find everything. We are working with a steering group to come up with series of themes, following new teaching directions.

The themes include: body and mind; from space to place; other cultures; memory of war; unconventional soldiers; strange meetings. View the full list.

It will include user generated content cherry picked by the academic steering committee such as unpublished diaries, photographs, letters. Within each theme there will be a list of these materials found on the web and also scholarly blog posts which surface some of the OER. It brings in the voice of contemporary research and seizes the academic debate with starting points for discussion etc.

It will also have a resource library. Materials that we put under one theme may be relevant for others so there is a searchable database.

We are showing some of the possibilities of using open materials. We have created a local memorial finder – can map onto google earth, zoom in, see the density of the memorials etc can also spin the globe and see where all the first world war veterans are buried, find out more info etc. A small app also helps you to find the nearest war memorial. We hope that tutorials will be built around these apps. We are also hoping for some 3D simulations. Using Unity 3D because you can build underground with it, building a subterranean 3D world for the first world war with a tunnel for every trench.

On 9 April @Arras95 will be tweeting the battle in real time and every tweet will link to a piece of open content, creating a picture of the battle. We want to engage the academic community.

6. RhyfelByd 1914-1918 a’rprofiadCymreig/Welsh experience of World War One 1914-1918 (Lorna Hughes, National Library of Wales)

This is a very new project, only started in February. It is funded through the JISC digitisation strand and with matched funding from partners including National Library of Wales.

It is an all-Wales partnership with every collection in Wales participating, which is really significant. While we are not going to digitise everything, the fact that they are all engaged as partners means that they are part of the framework we are building – it is a real strength of the project and enables us to build a real national picture.

It is also significant that we have the dual language tradition. There is a sense that there is a different narrative for the first world war in the Welsh language so being able to digitise in both languages will build a national picture. We're going to be building a cohesive archive to build a picture of the impact of the war in Wales on language, culture, gender and so on.

Scope – 190,000 page objects, approx 70/30 English/Wales. Also some audio etc.

We are encouraging all the partners to store the content in their own repositories so that it becomes a scalable project and they will have a model to develop more content in future.

We are working with the People's Collection Wales and we'll have targeted crowdsourcing to complement the material that’s in the archive. For example, chapel records – these are incomplete in the National Library but it's the sort of thing we know people have copies of in their lofts.

We are embedding some language translation tools, working with the centre in Bangor to build Welsh language translation tools.

A key thing is that the scoping of the content has been a very collaborative process. Academics and experts were engaged to ensure that the content we selected was key to scholarship. We took an approach where we talked to the special collections to find out what content was in demand and appealing then talked to academics to prioritise content. We also talked to academics about what they felt was missing from existing digital material. It was important to scope content to make sure it addresses specific research challenges.

It is also very important to make clear the question of context – the narrative of selection, we want people to know why we chose the material we did.

The key content for digitisation includes: records of Welsh Army Corps; Welsh newspapers 1913-1919; Welsh periodicals and other printed publications; personal archives of diaries, journals and letters; literary archives; official documents

The approach throughout is geared to dissemination and engagement. Aiming for consolidated and aggregated access to the content, making it available to the widest possible audience. Key are: resource discovery, way people interact and engage, building future impact into the resource

7. Q+A

Matt Shaw: do you have a strategy for copyright clearance?

Lorna: we hope to use CC licence, following the Library processes for copyright clearance. Approach copyright owners where we know who they are and if we do not get permission we do not digitise.

MS: 30% of ours are orphan works.

Lorna: we are building on previous work eg with newspapers. We have a long list of things to digitise because anticipate having to make substitutions because of IPR.

IWM rep: picking up on the themes, medical is an area we identified as a major area for potential work and we're doing work with the Wellcome Trust looking at the infectious disease aspect. So we should get more access to that material. Also maps. We have digitised a range of first world war maps there and now we're trying to make them available online and that can be challenging online because they are so big. Coordination really important here so we don’t end up digitising the same material. Also IPR issues – learning what other people do with that will be useful here.

Patricia Methven: however we present the findings eg themes, the search process has to be flawless.

8. Showcase of strategies, opportunities and partnerships for digital commemoration of the First World War (Gina Koutsika, Head of National and International Programmes & Projects and Luke Smith, Centenary Digital Lead, IWM)

I felt that in the time slot, I could not fairly showcase the bread and depth of possible opportunities and partnerships for digital commemoration of the First World War. Instead, I will point out a couple of initiatives that are relevant for our group today and then hand over to Luke who will focus on the Lives of the First World War, a collaborative project that will start now but continue to grow throughout the Centenary .