University forms alliance to take archive to Germany

Oxford University has taken its groundbreaking Great War Archive into Europe, after forming an alliance with the German National Library and Europe’s digital archive Europeana to digitise more family papers and memorabilia from the First World War.

The Great War Archive brought together 6,500 images of items submitted to Oxford University by members of the public in 2008. This new collaboration will bring German soldiers’ stories online alongside their British counterparts in a European 1914-18 archive.

Oxford University began the initiative when it asked people across Britain to bring family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. The success of the idea, which became the Great War Archive, has encouraged European partners to get on board.

A team from Oxford University’s Computing Services and the English Faculty travelled around Germany in April to launch the project and have already gathered information and objects for the digital archive – events in Frankfurt, Munich, Stuttgart and Berlin turned up more than 14,000 images. Roadshows invited people to bring documents and artefacts from family members involved in the First World War, which were then digitised by mobile scanning unites.

A website will allow people to submit material online and all the material will be available through Europeana, where it will add a new perspective to collections of First World War material from institutions across Europe.

"The Centenary in 2014 of the first year of the war will prompt many people to discover more about it and find out about family members involved"

Dr Stuart Lee

'Working together with the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and their partners in Germany to extend this initiative will give it new resonance,' said Dr Stuart Lee of Oxford’s English Faculty and director of the Great War Archive. 'The Centenary in 2014 of the first year of the war will prompt many people to discover more about it and find out about family members involved.'

Effectively a people’s history of the conflict, the addition of a German perspective is designed to bring online visitors even closer to those who witnessed it first hand through family souvenirs and the stories that have been handed down through the generations.

'We are proud to be part of this alliance,' said Dr Elisabeth Niggemann, the German National Librarian. 'These artefacts and their stories have survived and we must record them while they are still part of family memory.

'Little of this material will ever have been on public display, or been made available to historians. What the 1914-18 War demonstrates, especially at the personal level, is the futility of war, and the pity of it for the men and their families.'

One beneficiary of the archive might be Luisa Arndt, who was able to find a matchbox left by her grandfather Otto Arndt after it was submitted to the Great War Archive. Her story can be followed in a video on YouTube.