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Bloomsbury's online Churchill Archive will aim for a school and undergraduate readership as well as to serve scholars and advanced researchers.
The online resource, just launched, (churchillarchive.com) digitised 800,000 documents, ranging from Winston Churchill's correspondence to drafts for his famous speeches. The archive offers thematic pathways through the material and a "zoom" facility (Leaflet, used for Google Maps) to allow up-close exploration of handwritten texts. It integrates lesson plans and teaching resources with the access to the primary documents to allow younger students to explore the material.
The publisher predicts that the resource will lead to a significant increase in schools teaching pupils about Churchill and other areas of 20th-century history touched on by the archive. It will also aid researchers outside of the UK who have previously had limited access to the material.
Digital business development director Eela Devani said that while Bloomsbury isn't offering individual subscriptions, it is "mindful of school budgets"and plans an offer which would see individuals encouraged to "sponsor"a school to have access to the archive, while getting individual access for themselves as an add-on.
Devani reported "considerable interest"from schools in the US, as well as from institutions all over the world from destinations as varied as India, Kashmir and Finland. An offer to libraries is being made through a three-way deal between JISC in the UK and equivalent bodies in the US and Canada.
Major tasks for Bloomsbury included digitising the documents, completing the metadata for each one, and building the classification system-a process that involved "a lot of brainstorming", Devani said. There was also a "huge exercise"of clearing third-party copyright for thousands of letters for whom the copyright remains with the writers and their heirs-including the family of Gordon Wise of agency Curtis Brown, which administers Churchill's literary estate. Wise's RAF pilot father had a brief correspondence with Churchill.
Churchill Archives director Allen Packwood confirmed that his organisation had already started to discuss with Bloomsbury the online publication of a number of related collections, including the papers of Churchill's wife Clementine and the diaries of his private secretary Jock Colville.