World War I Resources: Digital Collections

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research. The heart of the archive consists of collections of highly valued primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas. This is supplemented by a comprehensive range of multimedia artefacts from the Imperial War Museum, a separate archive of over 6,500 items contributed by the general public, and a set of specially developed educational resources.

This archive covers the experience during and after World War I of PFC. Samuel Bloom (1895-1976). It includes Samuel Bloom’s Jewish Veterans of America membership card diary in the months before the war, and either diaries or the draft of a book recounting his war experience; weekly letters home (often of 8 or 10 pages) to his parents in New York; letters from the family to him (usually written by his brother Hyman) recounting family and current political events in New York; letters to him from friends, both in the army and back home; army documents; material on the Army School Detachment at the University of Montpellier in spring 1919 (including seven issues of the newspaper, theSoldier-Student); soldiers' guides for leave in Paris and elsewhere, and other guidebooks; and a group of postcards.

During World War I, the impact of the poster as a means of communication was greater than at any other time during history. The ability of posters to inspire, inform, and persuade combined with vibrant design trends in many of the participating countries to produce thousands of interesting visual works. The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division makes available online approximately 1,900 posters created between 1914 and 1920

This collection contains several discrete sections: a collection of forms and photos from the Spokane Public Library about young soldiers from that area, art from artists embedded in the regiments, World War I enlistment cards from the State Archives, photos, documents, and other resources. Read more at http://www.sos.wa.gov/library/digcolls.aspx