Where can you find photographs of Swansea in the Blitz, or the diaries of Welsh soldiers from the First World War? Where can you read the letters of a nine-year old girl who lived in Lampeter in Victorian times, or pages from an 1891 Welsh Football Annual? Where can you examine a 17th century tapestry work from Breconshire or a 19th century miners’ lamp from Aberdare? The answer for all these and more is the Gathering the Jewels website at www.gtj.org.uk.

Gathering the Jewels is a unique and exciting project which is putting over 25,000 images of Welsh culture and history on the internet. Museums, libraries, record offices and archives from all over Wales are contributing material to the project. and the website will include printed material, original documents, maps, photographs, paintings, artefacts, sound and film clips, and more. The site is fully bilingual, and will reflect all aspects of Welsh cultural identity.

As well as the main part of the website, with its huge database of images, a number of ‘Discovery Trails’are also under development. These will lead users in a more structured way through certain topics, and offer more background information and interpretation. Secondary school teachers and pupils will find the Trails on ‘Coal’ and ‘Wales and the First World War’ particularly useful, while a Trail on ‘Houses and Households’ is being developed for children of junior school age.

The website also features a comprehensive links section allowing users to visit the sites of all the repositories who contributed to the project. Visitors to the site can also take a break from searching the images by playing ‘Up, Up and Away’ our 3D balloon simulator. The game allows you to pilot a hot air balloon across the landscapes of Wales, attempting to visit places of interest in the quickest possible time.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2003 at 2:45 am and is filed under Members' Activities. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.