It has a trove of love letters to and from soldiers on the front lines of wars from the First World War onwards. Some of those letters are to and from men who were killed. They are heart-breaking to read.

One of them is a love letter written by an Australian soldier in the hours before he died in the landing at Gallipoli. There are also love letters from Australian pilots in New Guinea.

As well as messages of undying love from people who were to die themselves, there are private letters from nurses serving overseas, and years of correspondence between prisoners of war and their lovers back in Australia.

The memorial is looking for members of the public who can help it read these precious hand-written documents and turn them into text that can be viewed and searched online.

It has software that can read hand-writing and turn it into text, and needs people to operate it or to just read the letters themselves and type out what they say.

It's also got masses of other hand-written documents like diaries which it wants transcribed, so the task is immense.

There are nurses' hand-written eye-witness accounts which are heart-breaking but also of immense interest to historians who want to paint a picture of life at the front.

But it's starting with the love letters, appropriately enough on Valentine's Day.

"The love letters are often very poignant because it's war but unfortunately the soldier died," Robyn Van-Dyk, the head of the memorial's research centre, said.

One of the most moving is from one Marthe Gylbert who lived at Armentières on the border of France and Belgium. She fell in love with an Australian soldier but was then separated from him in the turmoil of war.

She sent him a letter on cloth embroidered with a heart. It's impossible to know who her great love was because she addressed it to "My little sweetheart".

And she doesn't seem to have had a reply, presumably because her love had died in the trenches.

But the War Memorial has the letter and countless more like it, expressing the unspeakable grief of war as felt by ordinary people.

The process of transcription will involve the volunteers getting access to the documents and transcribing them either with the software of just by reading them.

There will then be a second layer of checking where "elevated proof readers" (as the people at the memorial describe them) will reread the original and the transcription.

In a third layer of checking, staff will review the transcriptions for accuracy.

It won't be done in a day. The memorial has millions of pages of hand-written documents but the task is to make a start and to plough on.

Many of the letters and diaries are written in cursive script (script where the letters are joined to each other in a flow), and this makes them harder to decipher, either by a machine or a human eye.

On top of that, the original hand-writing has often faded - many of the letters were written in the most difficult conditions.

"Reading these letters is like travelling through time," the memorial's head of digital experience Terri-Anne Simmonds said.

"But because they were written in places like prisoner of war camps and front-line trenches, and are often written in cursive script, they are not always easy to decipher."

People who are interested in helping can go to the memorial's website: www.awm.gov.au/get-involved/work-or-volunteer/transcription