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.