The Big Lottery Fund, through Their Past Your Future (TPYF), funded a substantial programme of digitisation to increase public access to materials from the Imperial War Museum (IWM) collection.

Digitisation involves creating a digital representation of an original collection item, such as an object, photograph, painting, document or sound recording.
The Imperial War Museum digitises material from its collections for a range of purposes – for exhibitions and learning programmes, to provide 24-hour access to our extensive collections for users worldwide via the Internet, to provide access to fragile material, and for commercial purposes.
TPYF digitisation programme

The main focus of IWM’s TPYF digitisation programme was material related to the Second World War and post-war reconstruction. The IWM Collections Division has digitised a broad range of Second World War material relating to the various elements of the entire Their Past Your Future programme. This included the TPYF Touring Exhibition the Children’s War exhibition at IWM London, The North at War at the Imperial War Museum North, and the TPYF Commemorative Visits Programme. The material that is digitised under this programme was added to Collections Online, the Imperial War Museum’s online catalogue. For further information and access, please visit the IWM website.  The Big Lottery Fund provided £480,000 to fund digitisation for Their Past Your Future. This funding provided the additional staff needed to identify, conserve, document and digitise the material, and the equipment needed to scan and photograph large amounts of material.

In total, the Collections Division digitised over 70,000 items, including photographs, pictures of objects, sound recordings, documents, works of art and posters.