This year’s winner of the Community History Prize was the Royal College of Nursing with their project on: Service Scrapbooks: Nursing, Storytelling and the First World War.  A team of 32 volunteer nurses worked with the RCN Library and Archives team to make the stories of 10 First World War nurses available to a public audience for the first time. They scanned and transcribed 976 scrapbook pages from the archives, using them to recreate these nurses’ lives online.

Everything about the project delighted the judging panel. They were pleased to see the group working with retired and practicing nurses who were responsible, with help and training, for the research and digitsation of the scrap books and albums. The panel enjoyed the group’s blogs about their experience and learning; the tasks clearly became a labour of love and this shines through in the outputs. The panel all felt that recognizing the importance of these scrapbooks and finding a way to get the material online, especially in the centenary year of the end of the First World War, made this project a very worthy winner of the WHN community history prize.

For much more about the project see – https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/articles/2018-women-s-history-network-community-prize-winner/