Any opportunity to help other genealogists and researchers is a good one, and The National Archives in Great Britain announced an interesting project this week.

The National Archives (TNA) has spent the past three years digitising WWI unit war diaries and now they are looking for volunteers. These diaries are among the most popular records at TNA.

With this project, TNA hopes to create new Citizen Historians, working together to make previously inaccessible information available to academics, researchers and family historians worldwide, leaving a lasting legacy for the centenary of the First World War. They need volunteers who can spend an hour of their time — or more — to read and tag a few diary pages.

Earlier this week, TNA published the first batch of diaries online as part of First World War 100. You can search and download more than 300,000 diary pages of the first three cavalry divisions and the first seven infantry divisions to arrive on the Western Front. By the end of this year, TNA will have published the rest of the diaries that they have digitised, around 1.5 million pages in total, opening up an already popular record series to historians worldwide.

To learn more about the project and how you can get involved, visit The National Archives Blog. Thanks to Dick Eastman who brought this story to our attention in his eNewsletter article, Operation War Diary: A Crowd Crowdsourcing Project.