About the archive

Sources & methods

The Great War Archive brings together tens of thousands of letters and diary entries written between 1914 and 1918, drawn from libraries, digitization projects, and published collections. This page explains where the material comes from, how it was prepared, and how questions about rights and accuracy are handled.

Where the documents come from

• Digitized period booksThe largest share of the archive comes from books published during and shortly after the war: collections of soldiers' letters, war diaries, memoirs, and documentary volumes, in English, French, German, Russian, and Romanian. These were digitized by the Internet Archive and similar library scanning programs. Letters and diary entries were extracted from them verbatim.
• The Canadian Letters and Images ProjectThousands of Canadian letters come from the Canadian Letters and Images Project at Vancouver Island University, which has spent decades digitizing wartime correspondence lent by Canadian families. It is a remarkable collection and the project deserves your support. Each document taken from it links back to the original collection page.
• State Library of New South WalesAustralian wartime diaries come from the State Library of New South Wales transcription program, used under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.
• Published papers of wartime leadersThe words of generals, ministers, monarchs, and diplomats come from published editions of their diaries, letters, and official papers.

How the archive is built

• Texts are verbatimEvery letter and diary entry is reproduced exactly as it appears in its source. Nothing is paraphrased, abridged for tone, or rewritten. Where a source contains scanning errors, they are left in place rather than silently corrected.
• Translations are working aidsDocuments written in French, German, Russian, and other languages are shown alongside an English translation. The original text is always kept and displayed. Translations are reading aids, not scholarly editions.
• Cataloguing is checked, not perfectDates, writers, places, nationalities, and document types are catalogued from the sources and reviewed in passes that catch and correct errors. With tens of thousands of documents, mistakes still get through. When you find one, please report it.

Rights