Operation War Diary - is it dead?

[Chris_Baker]

Pals may recall "Operation War Diary" as another crowdsourcing project that was launched with much fanfare in 2014. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/operation-war-diary-archive-needs/

 

Its website now seems more or less dead: https://www.operationwardiary.org/

 

What has happened to the project and the work that many people put into it?

[Keith_history_buff]

It looks like it was pending migration to a new platform in March/April 2019, and is possibly still pending?
https://talk.operationwardiary.org/#/boards/BWD000000l/discussions/DWD0001p5a

[Chris_Baker]

Thanks, Keith. Hmm. Not sure what to make of that. It has all the hallmarks of dying.

[charlie962]

perhaps @David_Underdown has an informal informed view ?

 

Charlie

[David_Underdown]

The data taht was captured is safe, but has proved rather more difficult to work with than anticipated.  A pretty good proprortion of diaries had been tagged and then Zooniverse switched to a new platform which didn't support some of the custom tagging features used in Operation War Diary hence the (voluntary) effort to try and get it moved over to th eupdated platform to allow work to continue.  As you may have seen there's quite a fundamental look being taken at online services (see https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/project-alpha-building-an-archive-for-everyone/ and https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/technical-discovery-project-alpha/) - ultimately this work should make it easier to incorporate user generated content such as this, but it's taking up quite a bit of time at the moment which doesn't allow much looking at the things like Op War Diary data.

[charlie962]

Thanks for responding, David

[Chris_Baker]

Thank you. Perhaps not dead but in a coma, then. What a pity.

Edited 30 January , 2020 by Chris_Baker