Europeana 1914-1918

Europeana 1914-1918 was 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- had encouraged Europeana, Europe’s digital archive, library and museum, to bring other national institutions across Europe into an alliance with Oxford University.

The collaboration brought European stories online alongside their British, German, Slovenian, Luxembourgian, Irish, etc. Contributions were made in two ways:

• • • Europeana 1914-1918 website: add a picture of the item or type in the story online. The objects that were submitted were checked by the project team and then made available through Europeana.
    • At Family History Roadshows: bring the item(s) to the event where project staff will photograph the items and record the stories that go with them.

Furthermore, a partnership of European cultural heritage associations that have joined forces to bring together the digitised content of Europe’s galleries, libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual archives.

Any individual or institute can provide its collection with Europeana, provided that it is digitised (you can point to it with a weblink), descriptions of the objects (metadata) are available digitally, it is about Europe (made by a European or a European community or owned by a European institution) and the scope of the collection aligns with the Europeana Content Strategy.

Currently Europeana gives integrated access to 15 million books, films, paintings, museum objects and archival documents from some 1500 content providers. The content is drawn from every European member state and Europeana receives its main funding from the European Commission.

https://pro.europeana.eu/project/europeana1914-1918#:~:text=Background%20Europeana%201914-1918%20was%20based%20on%20an%20initiative,and%20keepsakes%20from%20the%20War%20to%20be%20digitised