Their Finest Hour Online Archive [Dataset]

‘Their Finest Hour’ was a crowdsourcing project based in the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford. Managed by Professor Stuart Lee (PI) and funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, between 2022-2024 this project sought to collect, digitise, and safeguard stories and objects relating to individuals’ and communities’ experiences of the Second World War, so that they could be preserved for posterity. The project culminated in the launch of the ‘Their Finest Hour Online Archive’, published on the SDS Platform on 6 June 2024 to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
The project received over 2,000 stories and 25,000 digitised and born-digital objects submitted by members of the public - ranging from candid family photographs and diaries to personal items such as a “lucky rupee” and woollen gloves. Submissions were made either directly through the dedicated online submissions portal or at one of 73 in-person Digital Collection Day events (DCDs) held across the UK, supported by 500 volunteers.
By supporting DCDs in community spaces, from the Wiener Holocaust Library (London) and Ahmadiyyah Mosque Hall (Leamington Spa) to Dumfries Museum (Dumfries and Galloway), the project aimed to make participation accessible to a wide range of communities and capture the diversity of wartime experiences.