|
||
23 January 2004
IMPORTANT: Please note that The National Archives are no longer held at Keele. The National Archives, Keele University and the Royal Commission on the
Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) have joined forces to secure the future long-term preservation and continued development of the aerial reconnaissance archive. The archive is now held by RCAHMS in Edinburgh. (9th December 2008)
Aerial Reconnaissance Archives3-D photographs of Nazi-occupied western Europe, used by Steven Spielberg when he was researching "Band of Brothers" and held at Keele, have been made available online for the first time. Over five million World War II aerial photographs - from The National Archives - are available. The new website, developed by The Aerial Reconnaissance Archives (TARA) at Keele, allows searches for images, from photographs taken by Allied pilots, of the D-Day landings, Auschwitz and other key events and places during the war. After the website was launched there were 550,000 hits within the first three hours and since then it has received 6,000 hits per minute, with peaks of 9,000 per minute, after attracting publicity around the world. Head of Digitisation at TARA, Allan Williams, said: "After the war, the same material that was used in anger was supplied to specialist bomb-disposal agencies throughout Europe. Thousands of unexploded bombs throughout Europe have been safely detonated thanks to TARA imagery, with countless lives saved. With more than ten million high-explosive bombs dropped during World War II, even today TARA continues this work on a daily basis. "The archival team has been scanning and cataloguing the maps and references used to search the archive, ready for the website's launch. We have manually keyed in 800,000 map references, relating to 33,000 reconnaissance flights - 5,000 more than we thought we had when we started. Now that we have released the five million pictures of occupied western Europe, we will start cataloguing over 2.5 million photographs of Eastern Europe taken by the Luftwaffe and we are already working on the millions of other aerial reconnaissance photographs at TARA, from World War II and later conflicts. "There are already more than 10 million images held at TARA, and within five years the website will have access to more than 40 million reconnaissance images, taken throughout the world since 1938. Ultimately aerial reconnaissance photographs of all British military campaigns, including the Suez crisis and the Korean War, the Falklands conflict and Gulf Wars will be available to the public." |
This week:Vice-Chancellor's
Committee - 19 January 2004 Pro-Chancellor's Retirement Dinner Aerial Reconnaissance Archives Higher Education Research Ethics Conference |
|
| top of page | Web Managers
for Chris
Stone Last modified: 09-Dec-2008 |