This repository contains the war diaries of Robert Brown, a Royal Artillery lance-bombardier, who enlisted in the British Army in 1940 and was later taken as a prisoner of war (PoW) during Rommel's second offensive against Tobruk in 1942.
The main objective of this repository is to function as an archive, preserving and transcribing the original material, which was at risk of being lost premanently owing to two factors:
- It was originally written in secret, on poor-quality paper, and smuggled between several PoW camps, meaning it wasn't in great condition to begin with.
- It had further deteriorated over the intervening 80 years.
As a result, this repository now contains a collection of high-quality scans alongside their corresponding transcribed texts.
The website, on the other hand, is a layer on top of this archive, that allows it to be read in a convenient way. In other words, it uses the archive as assets, but additionally pairs together the scans with their transcriptions on the same page and in a natural reading order, includes additional metadata regarding interesting concepts in hover-over links, etc.