The First World War online
With the new web portal www.europeana1914-1918.eu in the commemorative year 2014, the internet too has become a place of remembrance
Contemporary witnesses are long dead, yet they speak to us from the collected documents. The makers of www.europeana1914-1918.eu have collected and digitalized private memorabilia such as photographs, diaries, letters and drawings as well as books, pamphlets, trench newspapers, maps, newsreels and posters.
The thematic portal, which enables users to experience history and stories from the period between 1914 and 1918, contains half a million image and text documents that can be accessed by searches and according to thematic sections. Ten national libraries, from Germany, Denmark, France, England, Serbia and other countries, and 21 European film archives, are taking part in the project. Non-European collections from the United States, Australia and New Zealand have also made material available. At the start of the portal, the German Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, Monika Grütters, observed: “Among the numerous projects that the federal government has initiated and funded in the commemorative year 2014, this digital project is outstanding because of its international and border-crossing dimension. ‘Europeana1914-1918.eu’ illustrates impressively how Europe’s former disunity has today led to cooperation”.
Teachers, historians, journalists, students, publishers, Wikipedians, app developers and all other interested parties are invited to work creatively with the material. The web portal integrates two examples of handling the documents: the virtual exhibition The First World War: Places of Transition, which was developed by the Humboldt University in Berlin, and a multilingual e-learning site, developed by the British Library. “Almost all documents are freely available and we very much hope that using the new material will convey an enlarged view of European history to many people”, said Jill Cousins, Director of Europeana. Because one thing the website is not intended to be: a document dump. How moving the material can be may be seen in a video about an unlikely friendship between an English and a German solider.
www.1914-aufbruch-weltbruch.de
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