Introduction:

Guided by a panel of 16 international scholars, this project will establish itself as an essential portal for all those interested in the First World War.

The portal will offer a wide range of original manuscripts, ephemera, maps, visual content and rare printed sources on themes such as Trench Journals, Propaganda, the global nature of the conflict (looking at the involvement of colonial troops, the Eastern Front, Africa and the Balkans), Memory and Personal Experiences of War, Occupation, the Peace Process and Demobilization.

Sources will be drawn from leading archives in Australia, Canada, France, Belgium, Germany, Great Britain, New Zealand and the USA.

Links will also be made to peer-approved websites. All printed sources will have full text search and detailed metadata will be prepared for both our own and external content, so that scholars and students can benefit from searching through all the material from a single point.

The resource will contain a number of features including a visual slideshow, maps, a chronology, a bibliography and teaching pages showing how the material can be integrated into lessons with software such as Blackboard.

Contextual essays, written by members of our editorial board, will cover themes explored in the portal and will incorporate links to documents in the resource thus offering stimulating and useful ways of exploring and accessing the material.

Highlights

• Over half a million pages of original documentary evidence.
• Links offer access to millions of further pages
• Federated searching across thematic modules.

Editorial Board:

Professor Holger Afflerbach, University of Leeds
Professor Annette Becker, Université de Paris X, Nanterre
Dr Bruno Cabanes, Yale University
Professor Holger Herwig, University of Calgary
Dr Anthony Heywood, University of Aberdeen
Professor Gerhard Hirschfeld, University of Stuttgart
Professor John Horne, Trinity College Dublin
Dr Kate Hunter, Victoria University of Wellington
Dr André Lambelet, University of Adelaide
Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Professor Robin Prior, University of Adelaide
Dr Sophie De Schaepdrijver, Penn State University
Dr Adam Seipp, Texas A & M University
Professor Gary Sheffield, University of Birmingham
Professor Jonathan Vance, University of Western Ontario
Professor Jay Winter, Yale University

Nature & Scope:

Our digital portal will be a multi-module electronic publication with different modules being released over a five or six year period. Each module can be purchased separately and will function independently. However, the portal will also offer a federated searching capability across all content in all modules.

The first module will be released in July 2011. Digitisation for this is already well underway. A brief summary is given below.

Module One: Personal Experiences of War

Overview:

• Trench Journals and Trench Newspapers
• Diaries and letters
• Visual Material

Participating libraries and archives include:

Cambridge University Library (CUL)
Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte, Stuttgart (BfZ)
National WWI Museum at Liberty Memorial, Kansas City
Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, Canada
National Library of New Zealand (NLNZ)
Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

Further modules already in preparation or under consideration include:

• Module Two: Propaganda, Morale and Recruitment
• Module Three: A Global Conflict