Anzac Connections: 50 000 pages and counting!
Today marks an important event in the annals of the Australian War Memorial’s centenary digitisation project, Anzac Connections. 50 000 pages have now been scanned for online access by all Australians and international researchers. This milestone comes as we celebrate the release of another thirty-eight personal collections to supplement the 153 collections already available online. Each of these collections provides a fascinating insight into the experiences of the men and women who served as well as those who remained at home during the First World War.
This release of collections for the Anzac Connections project is the latest in a long-running digitisation program at the Memorial. Beginning in 1999 with the scanning of the First World War nominal roll, we have since scanned over 1.4 million pages. Amongst these have been the Red Cross wounded and missing files, the First World War embarkation roll, recommendations for honours and awards, Roll of Honour circulars and the unit war diaries compiled during the First World War.
The Anzac Connections project has been our most ambitious project to date as it marked the dawn of a new phase of digitisation for the Research Centre. When we first started scoping this project, we had been digitising official documents for almost 10 years. These were often files of well-ordered pages and could easily be accommodated in a collection database. They were well-suited to digitisation and our procedures were well established.
Turning our attention to the ephemera and private collections of letters and diaries held in the Memorial’s collections, back in 2006 and 2008 respectively, ushered in new challenges and issues that we had to address and then overcome for the project to succeed. What we were faced with at this time were scenarios where:
- Collections were often not catalogued on the Memorial’s collection database to the level required for digitisation (item or file level)
- Sometimes, they didn’t even have a database presence as they were managed by other means, either offline or via collection guides
- Collection material was continually being used by researchers so the order of pages within collections may have been disturbed
- Items had been digitised as required and often independently of a solution for the entire collection to which they belonged
The past five years has truly been an era of experimentation that has incorporated changes to search capabilities, online display of images, a full database migration, very detailed catalogue records that list every item contained in individual files and much stronger links between collections and people. 5 years later and we can now say that we have 191 of these collections online.
But we haven’t finished yet. Anzac Connections: Batch 6 has commenced with the first page being scanned on Thursday, 4 September. Please read Daniel McGlinchey’s excellent blog post about the process used to scan these collections and stay tuned for more blog posts as we delve further into Batch 6 collections and the stories behind Anzac Connections.
Scanning the first page of Anzac Connections: Batch 6