Thousands of pages of World War I materials in the Hoover Library and Archives were digitized by Adam Matthew for inclusion in The First World War: Propaganda and Recruitment, a digital resource that brings together archival materials from repositories in Europe and the United States.
The digitized content comes from a range of Hoover’s collections. Highlights include the war diaries of Nobel Prize winner Alfred Fried, propaganda postcards from the World War I Pictorial Collection, and recruitment flyers from the library’s extensive pamphlet collection.
Students at the University of Michigan, York University in Toronto, and the State Library of Victoria in Australia are already studying digital copies of the library and archives’ (L&As’) materials. Stanford students have free access to the digital collection, which includes materials from repositories in the United Kingdom, including the National Archives, British Library, and Cambridge University Library, and the Bibliothek für Zeitgeschichte and Landesarchiv of Baden-Württemburg in Germany.
A review in Library Journal summarized the resource as "stunning in depth, breadth, and multimedia versatility. Interactive maps and items in the 360° gallery are eye-openers, but the archival manuscripts and the extent of the overall collections are the real discoveries to be made here…. a remarkable resource that will bring the Great War directly to the desktops of researchers ranging from high school students to the most advanced World War I scholar."
Under the partnership with the Hoover Institution, Adam Matthew selected and digitized the L&A's materials at no cost to Hoover. Hoover, in turn, received copies of the digital images, free access to the resource, and a percentage of royalties on subscriptions.
