BBC News: World War Two veterans’ memories collected for new archive. “Landing on Juno Beach on D-Day, handing memos to Winston Churchill and working as a ‘land girl’ in the Women’s Land Army. These are just some of the remarkable memories of World War Two veterans whose stories are being collected for the West Wales Veterans Archive, which organisers say is an important and timely reminder of a turbulent chapter of history.”
Fine Books & Collections: International Collaboration to Digitize Archive of Dylan Thomas. “A digital collection of manuscripts and photographs related to Welsh poet and writer Dylan Thomas will soon be available online thanks to an international collaboration. Manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks, drawings, financial records, photographs, proofs, and broadcast scripts of the famous Swansea-born poet, whose works include the poem Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, and the play Under Milk Wood, among many others, will be made available worldwide through a collaboration that includes the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, Swansea University, and the Dylan Thomas Trust.”
WISERD: Voluntary sector history brought to life in new digital archive. “[Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods] has worked with the Wales Council for Voluntary Organisations (WCVA) and The National Library of Wales to create a historically significant digital archive of the Annual Reports of WCVA and its predecessor organisations. We are delighted to make this resource publically and freely available to social historians, researchers and the generally curious.”
BBC: Coronavirus: ‘Rolling lockdowns’ will become norm in Wales. “People in Wales should “get ready” for rolling lockdowns over the winter months, Wales’ chief medical officer has said. Dr Frank Atherton said Wales could be ‘going in and out of those restrictions over the next few months’. Local lockdown areas now cover 2.3 million people living in Wales.”
WalesOnline: Everything you need to know about fishing in Wales in one place. “Literally every place that you can go fishing in Wales has been researched and uploaded onto the site, along with contact information. With over 1,000 fishing locations including sea fishing marks, angling club waters and coarse fisheries, the website uses intuitive interactive maps, allowing you to find places to fish in Wales quickly and easily.”
Imperial College London: COVID-19 hotspots projected with new website. “A new website uses reported cases and deaths to estimate the probability regions in England and Wales will become COVID-19 ‘hotspots’. The team behind the website, from Imperial College London, define a hotspot as a local authority where there are more than 50 cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 of the population per week.”
Barry & District News: Unique piece of Wales’ Black history goes online. “An extremely rare piece of Wales’ Black history has been published online for the first time. Published on the city’s Bute Street in 1862, William Hall’s ‘Personal Narrative’ is a shocking and graphic account of his birth into slavery in Tennessee, and his arduous journey to Cardiff. Hall describes being sold to various plantation owners, detailing multiple attempts to escape his captors, as well as his encounters with other escaped slaves.”
Silicon Republic: Courtsdesk receives £70,000 to build legal database for UK journalists. “Dublin-based Courtsdesk has received £70,000 in funding to build a service supplying listings and outcomes of criminal court cases to journalists in the UK.”
BBC: Shielding: Allowed to leave home – but choosing to stay indoors. “People across England and Wales with health conditions that make them particularly vulnerable to coronavirus were allowed to spend time outdoors on Monday for the first time in 10 weeks. But some opted to stay at home.”
ITV News: Coal Authority to create single database for safety of old coal tips in Wales. “Information about coal tips around Wales will be put onto a single database to better manage their safety. The Welsh Government said it is part of ongoing work to assess the safety of all tips, following landslides during severe weather in February.”
Ramblers: Find. Map. Save: join the search to save thousands of miles of lost historic paths. “An estimated 10,000 miles of historic paths – the equivalent of the distance from London to Sydney – are thought to be missing from the map in England and Wales. These historic paths are a vital part of our heritage, describing how people have travelled over the centuries, yet if they are not claimed by 2026, we risk losing them forever. We want to build a movement of ‘citizen geographers’ to help find all these missing rights of way before it’s too late.”
Business News Wales: National Library of Wales to Lead on Welsh Wikipedia Project. “The 12-month pilot project is funded by the Welsh Government and will see the library’s National Wikimedian working with Menter Iaith Môn, WJEC and subject specialists. Together, they will identify the 100 most important events and themes studied for the subject of history in Welsh primary and secondary schools and develop techniques to structure relevant information regarding the topics to publish on the Welsh Wikipedia.”
BBC: Jewish communities: ‘Race against time’ to preserve south Wales history. “Efforts have begun to preserve 250 years of Jewish history in south Wales, after historians warned there was a ‘race against time’ to record stories. The Jewish History Association of South Wales (JHASW) has been awarded a grant of almost £55,000 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund.”
Slate: Welsh Wikipedia Gives Me Hope. “Google announced in February that it had expanded its offerings in Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drive to include Welsh. And Google Translate—infamous since 2009 for its Scymraeg, or scummy Welsh—has, according to the BBC, recently taken a great leap forward in terms of the accuracy and quality of its Welsh translations. Morlais and others attribute this in part to the fact that there are now more than 100,000 articles on the Welsh version of Wikipedia, known as Wicipedia.”
BBC: Wales’ national broadcast archive gets £4.7m grant. “A £9m project to create a national broadcast archive is set to go ahead after securing a £4.7m lottery grant. The National Heritage Lottery money follows an initial £160,000 grant awarded last year to develop the scheme.”
