Knowledge Management Online War effort

An inter government effort to collect and archive the service records of our war heros sees online research tool born.

By Siobhan Chapman

The records of more than one million Australian men and women who served their country during World War Two can now be accessed online due to a huge archiving project undertaken by three Government departments and a records management firm.

The launch of the online Nominal Roll for WW2 was the result of an immense effort from records management teams at various Government departments to transfer details from 60 year old, often hand-written paper records, into an electronic format. The roll (www.ww2roll.gov.au) drew on the service records of all Australians who enlisted during the war to provide an in-depth picture of the nation’s wartime history.

The Department of Veterans Affairs received a grant of $4.4 million as part of the Federal Government’s “Saluting Their Service” program, which encompasses a range of initiatives to preserve wartime memorabilia and commemorate Australian veterans from the turn of last century to today.

Veterans Affairs was charged with the task of transferring the records, somewhere between 1.2 to 1.3 million dossiers, from the Department of Defence spanning Army, Navy and Air Force records to the Commonwealth custodian of national records body, National Archives of Australia. On top of this transfer of the physical records, Veterans Affairs made the information available online.

Ian Cartwright, business manager of the project at Veterans Affairs, said the Department put out a tender for a data collection body and, after a selection process, contracted records management firm Pickfords to electronically capture the data and send the paper records to Australia’s archiving body National Archives of Australia. ”The electronic data was captured fortnightly, loaded onto the Web site. The Web site was built in-house,” said Mr Cartwright.

As part of its quality assurance process, Pickfords keyed in the data twice, Mr Cartwright told Image & Data Manager.

”High quality assurance processes were brought to bear in production. [Pickfords] started in July 2001 and completed the data entry component in August 2002.”After the data extraction, Pickfords put the records in acid free folders, bar coded them, put them in acid free boxes and sent them to the National Archives of Australia in batches. It took 10 months to transfer all the records into the Archives custody and the records span a staggering 6.5 kilometres of the department’s floor.

The database contains basic biographical details of each person such as their full name, date of birth, enlistment and discharge dates, rank; any gallantry awards and whether he or she was a prisoner. The Web site includes a search engine capable of searching the massive database by name, service number, honours received; place of birth, place of enlistment or town or suburb on enlistment form.

All the bar codes from the records folders have been loaded onto records search database, which is linked to the Archives’ Web site for people that come to get information.

Researchers and the general public can put in a request for Web access to further service details held by Archives at no charge. The requests take 30 days to process, digitise and put online. Paper copies of the original paper records, now maintained in the archives’ repository in Canberra, are also available at a modest cost.

Steve Stuckey assistant director general at National Archives of Australia said the archivists are getting 300 requests a day to get digital copy of records.

”The philosophy behind the nominal roll is we want as much access if you live in rural Kenya as if you live in downtown Sydney,” Mr Stuckey said.

Veterans Affairs Minister Danna Vale said “generations of Australians will now be able to easily access information on the wartime service of family members.”

Further to its efforts to preserve wartime records, Mr Cartwright said Veterans’ Affairs are working on other nominal rolls for health information studies, including the nominal rolls for the Korean war and the Vietnam war.