The research report on World War One sources and their use is to be published by JISC in early September. The report highlights the wide variety of hardcopy and digital sources relating to the war in UK repositories and calls for a refocus on the teaching of often neglected aspects of the war, such as the naval campaign, war and empire, the global nature of the conflict and themes such as medicine, nursing, technology and industry, labour relations and the home front. While trench warfare and Western Front narratives remain central to the story, the report recogises that the 'world' needs to be put back into the 'World War'. UK projects focusing on the war need to connect more readily with similar projects - and content - that exist elsewhere in Europe and beyond, as Europeana is trying to achieve.
The report highlights the need for additional support for cataloguing, without which collections cannot be identified and made accessible, and the agreement of common vocabularies to describe the experience of the war - a necessary precondition of the successful implementation of Linked Data aggregation of war-related multimedia content - photographs, oral histories, maps and documentary film - that is proposed as part of the 2014 commemorations. Already-digitised, but locally accessible content needs to be made available online for broader reuse in teaching and research to extract full value from past investment in digitisation.
Potential roadblocks include lack of clarity in licensing; and the absence of adequate local IT support, upon which information professionals depend.
