I’m too late for Veteran’s Day; can I get away with saying I’m really, really early for next year? The University of North Carolina has announced that it has put up about 2000 World War I postcards in honor of Veteran’s Day. Better news is that there are an additional 4400+ postcards that are in process and that the library expects to have up by 2010.

The URL of the collection is http://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/graypc/. You can search by keyword, browse by topic (countries, people, or subject), or browse the whole collection. I looked at the topic and decided to look at airships. There are only three under that topic but they have title, subject note, and sometimes a description.

Take a look at this collection which actually offers front and back views of six different cards, showing dirigibles, biplanes, monoplanes, and a couple of incredibly steampunky-looking destroyers. You can drag to move the views and actually move in pretty close. The view pages also have details about each postcard including publisher, dimensions, and publishing date (though these are not precise for the ones I looked at.)

Pretty cool! Now if I can just be a little more timely next year…