Text-Only Version
Jump to: Technical Note
About the Collection
This digital collection provides a sampling of UW-Madison's World War I
Special Collection. The complete collection is available in the Special
Collections Department of Memorial Library. Most of these materials were
acquired by the University during or in the immediate aftermath of the
war and they represent a direct and often very passionate or partisan
viewpoint of that conflict. These are primary sources, the raw materials
of history, and they bring the first great worldwide conflict of the
twentieth century to us in an immediate way, without the viewpoint
provided by intervening years and events.
UW-Madison's World War I collection focuses primarily, though not exclusively, on European aspects of the war. It is particularly strong in documenting rescue and relief efforts, and in propaganda materials, but all aspects of the war are included.
We have made a special effort to include visual images in the digital collection, including illustrated periodicals as well as memorabilia. Included as well are two multivolume illustrated histories from combatants on opposite sides: Gabriel Hanotaux, Histoire illustrée de la guerre de 1914 and Grosser Bilderatlas des Weltkrieges.
Organization, conservation, and digitization of the World War I collection was made possible by the UW-Madison General Library System, and by grants from the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries and the University's Brittingham fund.
Technical Note
Please note that full-text searching for the electronic-facsimile texts in our collections is based on uncorrected OCR (Optical Character Recognition) results. While such text is often highly accurate, it will contain errors that may affect your search results. In particular, texts with the following characteristics are particularly prone to error (in some cases, accuracy for such texts is so low that we have decided not to attempt to provide full-text searching):
- Hand-written texts;
- Texts that contain diacritics;
- Texts that contain non-Latin scripts;
- Texts that contain obsolete characters (including the "long S" [looks like an "f"]);
- Texts that are printed in a font in which the letters are difficult for the software to differentiate.
Top of Page