With some (much, much less) of the trepidation that must have been in the minds of soldiers going over the top in World War I, we are about to move to our new site on April 15. You should find that our URL — http://www.measuringtheanzacs.org/ — will redirect to the new site. As with all the best laid plans, we don’t know quite how this will go …

We have rebuilt the workflow on the new Zooniverse software that is more stable, and continues to be supported. There are some significant changes, but we hope that you will quickly get used to the site.

At first we have just two tasks available: sorting pages, and transcribing History Sheets. These are performed separately, rather than in one integrated workflow. We think that as the database got very large, the integrated workflow was probably slowing down the site.

Unlike the previous site, we are unable to offer support for browsing entire files. This was a feature of our previous Scribe software, but it is not built into the Panoptes “software stack.”

Once we have seen that our History Sheet transcription workflows are working, we will release work flows for the other key pages: Attestations, Medical Attestations, Statements of Service, and Death Notifications.

The initial group of soldiers whose files are represented on the site are a special group. They are men who died during, or shortly after, the war and are remembered on war memorials in the Far North, including Kaitaia.

We were honored last year to work with historian Kaye Dragicevich and contribute biographies of some of these soldiers to a book about them that will be published soon. As part of this collaboration, University of Minnesota Learning Abroad students working with Measuring the ANZACs researcher Evan Roberts visited Kaitaia and presented their biographies.

There are 2608 pages of files on 120 men represented on the site, and we hope that you will appreciate knowing the special history of this collaboration and what linked these men.

Our new site design will make it much easier for us to collaborate with you, and use Measuring the ANZACs as a platform for quickly transcribing the files of particular groups. If you can provide us with the list of men or women whose files you want transcribed, we can arrange for this data to be included in different batches of uploads. Please be in touch with us at measuringanzacs@umn.edu to discuss the possibilities of collaboration.