Jatinder Mann is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the ‘Australia in War and Peace, 1914-19′ research project at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King’s College London. He is also an Associate Fellow in Canadian Studies at the UCL Institute of the Americas. Jatinder specialises in transnational and comparative history and politics. He was awarded his doctorate in history at The University of Sydney in 2011 for his thesis entitled ‘The search for a new national identity: A comparative study of the rise of multiculturalism in Canada and Australia, 1890s-1970s’. He was also awarded the Endeavour International Postgraduate Research Scholarship (EIPRS) by the Australian government and an International Postgraduate Award (IPA) by The University of Sydney.

Michael Lucas read History at the University of Sussex, then worked in hospital management up to retirement in 2008. He has researched 9th Battalion East Surrey Regiment for over eight years, his interest first aroused by discovering a great-uncle had served three years with them on the Western Front. Michael has had a number of articles published, including in the Western Front Association’s Stand To. His book The ‘Journey’s End’ Battalion -The 9th East Surrey in the Great War followed in 2012.

Andrew Lucas read English at Keble College Oxford. He works as a programmer in the field of natural language processing and lives in Surrey. In 2006 he began investigating his German great-grandfather’s First World War service with 4 Kgl. Sächs Feldartillerie-Regiment Nr 48, and has been researching the Royal Saxon Army from German sources ever since, in collaboration with a friend in Dresden. Andrew provided background research on the 9th East Surreys’ many German opponents for his father’s book, and has recently had the first of a projected series of three articles published in Stand To. He is an active member of the 1914-21 Society, the only ‘living history’ group in the UK devoted to the First World War on the Eastern Front.

Patricia Methven, UKAD Steering Committee Member, chairs a discussion between Representatives from Google’s Cultural Institute, Wikipedia, the Digital Public Space, The Space and Europeana.

Lianne Smith talks about using Linked Data markup to archive descriptions relating to the First World War.

Alexs Drozdov talks about what an API is, and what the Discovery API might mean for contributing data to Discovery.

Christine Gifford was a member of Jack Straw’s Openness in Government Working Party which was involved in the drafting of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Subsequently she acted as an adviser to the Lord Chancellor on the implementation of the Act. She is a recognised expert on access to information and has worked not only with public sector organisations in the UK but also in Europe, South America and India. She has been a member of the Advisory Panel on the Use of Public Sector Information and is currently a member of the Advisory Council on National Records and Archives.

Following the release of the fifth tranche of records on 26 April, Diplomatic and Colonial Records Specialist Daniel Gilfoyle outlines the files released in this tranche.

This release contains records from Ceylon, Kenya, Malta, Mauritius, New Hebrides, Nigeria, Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Palestine, Sierra Leone and Singapore.

Jenny Bunn talks about Developing Descriptive Interoperability: A Call to Action

The forum is an opportunity for archivists and information professionals to hear and share some of the latest thinking around online access to archives and archives data and share ideas around making archives more accessible through online development.