About
Background
Europeana 1914-1918 is based on an initiative at the University of Oxford where people across Britain were asked to bring family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. The success of the idea – which became the Great War Archive – has encouraged Europeana, Europe’s digital archive, library and museum, to bring other national or local institutions across Europe into an alliance with Oxford University. The collaboration brings European stories online alongside their British, German, Slovenian, Luxembourgian, Irish, etc. counterparts in a World War One stories collection. Please refer to our project website for more information
Europeana Collections 1914-1918 is a different project from Europeana 1914-1918: ‘Europeana Collection 1914-1918’ is a library project. It will create by 2014 – the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War – a substantial digital collection of material from national library collections in eight countries that found themselves on different sides of the historic conflict. Please refer to ‘Europeana Collections 1914-1918’ project website for more information.
What we are doing
The project is collecting memorabilia and stories from the period of the Great War (1914-1918). This phase of the project is focussing on European items: letters, postcards, photographs and stories from Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Slovenia and the UK. Contributions can be made in two ways:
- Via Europeana 1914-1918 website - add a picture of the item or type in the story online.
- At the collection days events - bring the item(s) to the event where project staff will photograph the items and record the stories that go with them
Collection days
At the collection days’ events, members of the public are invited to bring their documents, artefacts and stories from the First World War to be recorded by the project staff. The stories and scanned or photographed images of the objects are then added to the archive.
Collection days have previously been held across Europe. Please refer to our project website for more information
Online story collection
The online story collection opened in March 2011. At the website, anyone can add their objects to the collection together with their stories. More information about how to add something to the collection can be found on the “Add your story!” page. The objects that are submitted are checked by the project team and then made available through Europeana.
Project partners
- University of Oxford
- German National Library – die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
- National Library of Luxembourg – Bibliothèque nationale du Luxembourg
- National Library of Ireland
- National Library of Slovenia – Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica
- The Royal Library: The National Library of Denmark and Copenhagen University Library - Det Kongelige Bibliotek: Nationalbibliotek og Københavns Universitetsbibliotek
- Europeana
