World War I Collections Now Available Online

January 3, 2018

The Museum of Flight Archives is pleased to announce the completion of a grant-funded project to digitize all of our World War I-related archival holdings. The 18-month project, supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been the first of its kind for the Museum: a complete project to fully process, catalog, digitize, and make collections available online. The result is a dedicated website showcasing unique archival materials from approximately 50 collections related to World War I, collections that include the personal accounts of WWI aviators, technical information about the aircraft they flew, and ephemera that documents their wartime experiences.

The project website, which we have named The Museum of Flight Digital Collections, contains all of the digitized items and allows users to browse the collections as if the physical boxes and folders of materials were in front of them. There is a wealth of material to explore, from photograph albums to correspondence to military orders to sheet music of WWI-era songs. We are thrilled to be able to make these collections publicly available online, as they provide deeply personal insights into the challenges, hardships, and triumphs faced by soldiers and civilians alike.

We invite you to explore The Museum of Flight Digital Collections at https://digitalcollections.museumofflight.org/. We plan to add more content as we tackle future digitization projects, so stay tuned!