Expanding on the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive and the Virtual Seminars for Teaching Literature project, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive was officially launched on Armistice Day, 11 November 2008. To date, the archive holds over 4,000 digital items (not including the Great War Archive). Far from being of interest only to poetry scholars and enthusiasts, this digital archive, created by the University of Oxford and funded through the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), is a must‐see resource for anyone with a remote interest in the First World War.
The archive's collections include the works and correspondence of major British poets from the war period such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Ivor Gurney. New content is still being added, with the works of Edmund Blunden having recently been completed, and a collection for Siegfried Sassoon expected this autumn. Each poet's collection is introduced with a short biographical essay, followed by images of primary materials such as literary manuscripts and correspondence, and contextual materials including war‐related photographs and images of official documents. For the serious scholar, the site offers advanced searching features where one can, for example, search for all of the poems in the collection where the term home occurs within twenty words of the term death. Browsing features also allow visitors unfamiliar with the poets or their works to wander through the collections as they wish.
Additional collections place the war in context – current offerings are divided into photographs, audio, film, and war publications. Education materials include in‐depth, self‐directed tutorials, resource packets for instructors, and a Pathways tool that allows educators (or visitors) to create annotated “trails” through the digital archive. Another 6,500 digital items related to the First World War can be found in the Great War Archive collection; these materials were collected from the general public between March and June of 2008. The call for contributions was so popular that there is now a Great War Archive Flickr Group which has continued collecting images after the acceptance period for the main site's collection closed.
Extensive documentation for both collection materials and the development of the archive project provide visitors with a further understanding of both the origin of the items and the purpose behind the creation of the site. Future plans are in place to enrich the archive through the use of Web 2.0 tools such as Google Maps, Google Earth, Flickr, MIT timelines, and VUE (Visual Understanding Environment). These tools will be used to create podcasts, geo‐linking, historical timelines, and structured paths through the archive.
It is difficult to find any criticism of this site. The layout and design are visually appealing, and both search and browse features allow all levels of visitor access to the collections. Other helpful features include a detailed help page, copyright information for use of archival content, and the ability to mark favourites in the collection that can then be viewed and compared. Suggestions can be sent to the site managers to alert them of an error, suggest an additional resource, or submit a general comment. One improvement might be to have the items that are linked off main collection pages open in a new window for easy toggling between items. As it stands now, if someone follows a link off of a main collection page, he/she must use the browser's back feature to return to the place of origin, which can get tricky since ten clicks on the new page may have passed before the visitor wants to return.
The people associated with this project should be commended for creating and maintaining a wonderful addition to the online resources related to the First World War. Much like the Library of Congress' American Memory collection (although with a narrower scope), this freely available digital archive offers something for everyone – from the literature or history scholar, to the middle or high school student studying the Great War. Highly recommended for school, public, and academic library audiences.
