National Library of Israel, in a special collaboration with Facebook Israel, calls on Israelis to identify and tag family members in photos.

The National Library of Israel, in a special collaboration with Facebook Israel, is calling on Israelis to identify and tag family members and friends in historic photos of Israeli soldiers.

The Naming the Soldiers project was launched in honor of the 71st anniversary of Israel’s birth.

The National Library located in Jerusalem is home to thousands of photographs documenting the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and its forerunners. The photographs are being digitized – from yellowing negatives to high resolution images.

The library on Tuesday uploaded a series of photo albums to its Facebook page featuring images of Israel Defense Forces soldiers taken during several of the country’s wars. It is asking the public to identify and tagfamily members and friends so that their memories will be preserved.

The National Library collection includes more than 2.5 million photographs documenting the history of the Land and State of Israel, considered to be the world’s largest collection of Israeli photographs spanning a period of over 150 years. The archive also includes the Dan Hadani Collection, more than one million press photographs from Hadani’s Israel Press and Photo Agency, founded in 1965, which document almost every event in the history of the country.

“We are happy to share with the Israeli public the important task of preserving the culture and heritage of the State of Israel,” Yaron Deutscher, head of the National Library’s Digital Access Division, said in a statement. “We are confident that through this cooperation with Facebook, which enables us to extract these cultural treasures from the archives of the Library and make them accessible to large audiences, a great deal of information will be gathered, enabling students, researchers and the general public to know more about what has happened here since the establishment of the State.”