Following on from Fae and myself meeting Robin Urquart of the National Archives of Scotland, I'm looking for people who may be interested in working on a WW-I related GLAM project.
The Archives have an extensive collection of letters that soldiers wrote to be delivered to family members in the event they were killed. Due to the accessibility requirements imposed on any body like the archives, there is a need to transcribe such documents before they can make them widely available.
Each letter generally has associated personal effects, such as tickets to the last theatre show someone saw before going to the front. So, they make for a beautiful piece of very personal history. With WW-I having "pals regiments" and the entire young male community from towns and villages serving - and dying - together, these can readily be focussed on small geographic areas. Perhaps even readily covering everyone listed on specific war memorials.
I'm open to any and all ideas on how we could work with the National Archives of Scotland on this; there's work for those who shun sunlight in transcribing handwritten letters (to meet their accessibility requirements), linking letters and effects to specific monuments, and anything else people might can come up with.
To me, it doesn't seem unreasonable to aim to use Commons, Wikisource, *and* Wikibooks. A QR code could be placed at a relevant war memorial, it points to a Wikibook collecting all the soldiers' letters, with scans and transcripts. If the relevant items in the National Archives are properly referenced there should be nothing to stop a local venue such as a church having an exhibition of the original letters and associated items like tickets to the theatre the night before someone died. Doing that in the 2014-2018 window is not going to be difficult.
Since I'm unemployed after Friday this week, I'd like to devote some time to getting the ball rolling on this. But, I've a hunch this is something that could be excellent for waking the wider public up to projects other than Wikipedia, recruiting local history buffs as new content contributors, and getting cultural institutions to 'think outside the box' around working with us.
Feel free to throw in suggestions and comments!
Brian McNeil.