AustLit

'The First World War (1914–1918) produced an explosion of record making and record keeping, from state agencies conducting a war of unparalleled scale, to individuals and families producing testaments of experience which also often became objects of remembrance and memorialisation. The effort to document has a history; so too does the determination – or otherwise – to retain those records, organise and describe them, and provide for or otherwise deny access to them. In turn, the ways in which contemporaries recorded and then archived the First World War have powerfully shaped the kinds of histories produced over the last century. The war was being recorded and archived as it happened – and for decades after – for particular reasons and particular purposes. The processes of recording and archiving have bequeathed in different times and places alternately a very rich, very partial, and very prejudiced record of conflict and its legacies. This special issue of Archives and Manuscripts grew out of a gathering of scholars in Melbourne in 2018. The conference, hosted by the International Society for First World War Studies, took as its theme ‘Recording, narrating and archiving the First World War’. Our selection of papers from that conference revisits the creation, recreation and transmission of knowledge about the war. Together, a series of archivists and historians investigate the ways in which a war that has been so critical not only to defining the modern world, but also individual and cultural identities, has been shaped and reshaped by those who produced and archived its record for a century since 1914.' (Bart Ziino & Anne-Marie Condé, Editorial introduction)