The UK National Inventory of War Memorials (UKNIWM) has partnered with Channel 4 to make the names recorded on First World War memorials in the UK accessible online for the first time. This new facility will enable viewers to put faces and personalities to the names carved in stone.

The Channel 4 Lost Generation website brings together a wealth of detail and allows viewers to discover how the memory of their relatives who fought and fell in the war has been preserved on public monuments.

Most importantly, this on-line record will be turned into a living war memorial by the facility for viewers to upload pictures and text, documents and images of personal effects onto the site, to be linked to the relevant names. In so doing, viewers can help turn the commemorated names back into "real" people.

Channel 4 approached the UKNIWM to help make the Inventory's sixteen years of sterling work accessible to all in time for the 90th anniversary of the Somme. The UKNIWM, based at the Imperial War Museum, have co-ordinated a nationwide network of volunteers to compile the first comprehensive record of war memorials in the UK. The lists of names recorded on memorials and submitted to the UKNIWM archive have provided the raw data for the Lost Generation names database.

Lost Generation is the new media dimension of a major new First World War season on Channel 4 focusing on the Battle of the Somme and the effects of the First World War on the social fabric of modern Britain. Presented by Ian Hislop, Not Forgotten is a four part series from Wall to Wall [Who do you think you are?] which uses Britain's war memorials as the starting point for an investigation of the impact of the First World War on British society. A handful of names are taken from war memorials, their individual stories are uncovered and their living relatives are tracked down. The Somme, a powerful and gripping docu-drama, produced by Darlow Smithson [Touching the Void], recounts in detail the story of one of the worst days in British military history.

Both websites were launched at the Imperial War Museum on 3 November.

Channel 4 Lost Generation Website - a searchable database of First World War names on memorials with a facility for users to upload their own content.

UK National Inventory of War Memorials Website - a searchable database of all UK war memorials from all periods.