Rhyfel Byd a’r profiad Cymreig Welsh experience of World War One

Lorna HughesUniversity of Wales Chair in Digital Collections

National Library of Wales

Strategic Content Alliance WW1 Roundtable meetingMarch 27th 2012

Rhyfel Byd a’r profiad Cymreig /Welsh experience of World War One

• New mass digitization project: JISC e-Content programme 2011-13 • Project duration: Feb 2012 – July 2013• £500,000 funding from JISC (FEC £987,916)• Supported by partner institutional contributions, especially NLW• Welsh Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF) partnership• Partners: National Library of Wales (lead); Aberystwyth University;

Bangor University; Trinity St David’s; Swansea University; Cardiff University; Archives of BBC Cymru Wales; archives and local records offices in ARCW (Archives and Records Council, Wales); The People’s Collection, Wales.

• Will produce unified, cohesive digital archive of text, image, audio and film

• Developed in consultation with many stakeholders: will have major impact on research, teaching and commemoration time for centenary education and commemoration

• Contribute national picture impact of WW1 on Wales• #CymruWW1

Project overview and scope

• Content to be digitized from NLW and partner collections• 190,000 pages of printed text, archival pages, manuscript pages and

photographs; 50 hours of audio; and 20 hours of audio visual material• Content approximately 70% English and 30% Welsh• Content presently fragile, difficult to access; dispersed around institutions

in Wales. • Digitization to take place at NLW (except Cardiff content) • Digital content stored in Institutional Repositories at NLW, and partner HEIs• Consolidated and unified access via common user interface• People’s Collection Wales will undertake 3 targeted community digitization

workshops; and assist with developing ARCW content• Will hold a series of of community and scholarly workshops dedicated to

developing content and approaches to embedding the resource in teaching and research, building a network of researchers to encourage use of resource

• Canolfan Bedwyr (Bangor) will implement language technology tools, and methods for enriching digitized content for multilingual access to bilingual content.

Embedding impact in planning: scoping content

• Content scoped in collaboration with partners, academics, authors, educators, media, exhibitions staff….

• Needs of users core to digital scholarship, and should inform selection and resource discovery

• Careful selection of content will increase value, use and impact of digital resources, tools and methods

• Understanding the narrative of archival selection will be key to understanding digital resource – Project developed in consultation with academics to ensure impact on

research, teaching and commemoration– Content selection collaborative and iterative process between special

collections, libraries, archives; and academics– Enabling not ‘digital history’, but ‘good history’– Workshop at NLW April 19th to complete selection process

Key content for digitization

• The records of the Welsh Army Corps. – Recruitment of volunteers; mobilisation of public attitudes in support of the war– Construction and mobilisation of national identities for the war effort in official materials

• Welsh newspapers 1913-1919. – Reports illustrating world events, as well as the impact on citizens not part of the fighting. – Letters from soldiers, poetry columns, and other literary content. – Llais llafur / Labour voice, Merthyr pioneer, Y dinesydd Cymreig; local, national Welsh – Expanding Welsh Newspapers Online Project

• Welsh periodicals and other printed publications. – Include first hand evidence of the impact of the War. – Y Gymraes; student newspapers; and Y Deyrnas (journal of conscientious objectors)

• Personal archives: diaries, journals and letters – correspondence, contemporary writings– oral histories: National Screen & Sound Archive of Wales; South Wales Miners Library;

BBC Cymru• Literary Archives

– “Welsh War Poets”: Edward Thomas, David Jones and Hedd Wyn (Ellis Humphrey Evans)– To compliment existing projects, e.g., Oxford First World War Poetry Archive

• Official documents– Church & chapel records, reports; official records, e.g., trades union & shipping records

List of content: http://www.llgc.org.uk/index.php?id=5444.

Incorporating dissemination and engagement

• Consolidated and aggregated access to locally hosted data from partner HEI repositories and People’s Collection, Wales

• Exposing content for widest harvesting and discovery via OAI Protocol for metadata harvesting

• Use of community standards for data development, encoding and controlled vocabularies

• Use of NLW’s flickr Commons for sharing selected visual resources• Project budget includes usability testing workshops and stakeholder

engagement with: researchers across the arts and humanities, librarians, archivists, cultural heritage staff, funders, technical experts, data scientists…

• Interface will use TIDSR (Toolkit for the Impact of Digital Scholarly Resources http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/) toolkit for analytics and statistical gathering tools to understand use, and increase impact and uptake

• Fully bilingual and accessible user interface will embed multilingual cross-searching services

• Engagement with other WW1 digital projects and resources….Encouraging use and embedding of resource will

support long term sustainability!