2024 was a successful year for the IBCC Digital Archive team of staff and volunteers. The archive has grown and increased in scope. Over 35,000 public items in more than 2,000 collections are now publicly available.

Volunteers at work at our archive offices at the University of Lincoln’s Riseholme campus.

The archive now contains 17,000 photographs and 15,000 text items. Thanks to Steve Baldwin and the transcription team, 56 % of these, including letters, diaries, and names on photographs, have been transcribed. There are now over 750 log books available in the archive, and special mention should go to Mike Connock, who has worked on around half of these. Thanks to other volunteers, almost 800 photographs have been geolocate

The Mulberry Harbour and the coastline at Gold Beach, September 1944.

Five new wartime interviews were recorded and added this year by our volunteers, but we have also begun to digitise and publish interviews that were recorded before our project began by family members, historians, and other agencies. See for example, the Air Sea Rescue collection, the Aviation Heritage Lincolnshire collection, or interviews recorded with Bomber Command veterans by Steve Bond.

John Monaghan in the Avro Heritage Museum’s Lancaster. Susanne Pescott interviewed him for our archive in August 2024.

To facilitate detailed searches, the number of dates and places associated with items have been increased. Since last year, the number of recorded dates (Temporal Coverage) have increased from 50,000 to 58,000 and with more than 112,000 places, Spatial Coverage has been increased by over 14,000 instances. By combining date and place fields, items specific to the Ruhr Campaign (5 March – 10 July 1943),  the Berlin Campaign (23 August 1943 – 25 March 1944), and the Normandy campaign (6 June – 21 August 1944) can now be quickly searched.

Officer addressing a crowd of aircrew before D-Day.