Recently Museums Galleries Scotland launched the website Remembering Scotland at War, the result of a three-year collaboration with museums and galleries across Scotland funded by the Big Lottery Fund. Most interesting from the perspective of the RunCoCo project is the community area of this large online museum, where you can upload your own story or photos and see what others have shared.

Community page from Remembering Scotland at War

I struggle with the two ‘Community’ sections of the Remembering Scotland at War website, one linked from the ever-present top-navigation bar, and the other linked from other parts of the site including the home page. However I guess if I was to become actively involved the distinction between them would become evident.

The website look-and-feel and crowdsourcing functionality are very similar to The People’s Collection Wales launched last month, and the more established digital storytelling sites Digitalt fortalt (Norway) and Platsr (Sweden).

If interest takes off Remembering Scotland at War will be able to do what our pilot project The Great War Archive only dreamed of. Community archives about the World Wars include Oxford’s The Great War Archive, the BBC’s WW2 The People’s War, the more recent From Warfare to Welfare 1939-1959 from the National Library of Wales and the Welsh Voices of the Great War Online currently collecting (blog post for further information) from their base at the University of Cardiff. But these have not made great play of the user-generated content side of their activity – beyond, of course, the publicly digitised and contributed content. What I mean is, the community side of Remembering Scotland at War emphasises the sharing of content and knowledge by the ‘community’, e.g. giving contributors the ability to comment on material, to rate it, to gather it together in their own ‘scrapbooks’ or collections – not organised by the constraints of the formal metadata.

The Great War Archive was indebted to contributors who attended our public roadshow at Edinburgh Library on 4 June 2008 but also to the many who submitted to the Archive from across Scotland, especially the community on the Orkneys. For example, these are just a couple of the photos submitted The Great War Archive that relate to Captain Thomas N. F. Hourston, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, (images © The Great War Archive, University of Oxford / Ian M Hourston):

Kilt worn by Thomas N. F. Hourston

Thomas N. F. Hourston in uniform