Thursday, January 16, 2014

Crowdsourcing War Diaries tagging


This year marks 100 years since the start of World War I.  

The National Archives in the UK has launched an ambitious project to use crowdsourcing to tag 1.5 million images of war diaries.

There aren't many genealogists who don't have numerous connections to people who served in World War I.  We now have a chance to participate in making some great records available to ourselves and others researching people and regiments involved in this conflict.

You can already browse some of the digital images free here, and when the tagging project is done, they intend to make it available free through the Discovery feature on their site.

The War Diaries aren't exactly what you might expect, if you think of a diary as something that a young girl may keep.  They were more like form pages that people filled in each day with short descriptions of what happened and where and to who.  Think more like "Sgt. Smith was wounded today" than "Nurse Smith sure is a hottie!"

You can sign up to be a Citizen Historian and get started was tagging these important records here: Operation War Diaries

There is a real-time online community to chat with to share things with or help with issues that may arise as you work.

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