Europeana 1914–1918

Contents

Europeana 1914–1918 is a crowd-sourced digitisation and archival initiative documenting the First World War through personal collections, photographs, letters, diaries and memorabilia. The project connected institutions such as the British Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Austrian National Library and Europeana to aggregate material related to the First World War, Battle of the Somme, Battle of Verdun and Gallipoli Campaign. It aimed to preserve ephemera tied to figures and entities like Wilhelm II, Kaiserreich, David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson while supporting research on battles such as Battle of Tannenberg (1914), Third Battle of Ypres and campaigns including the Italian Front (World War I), the Eastern Front (World War I) and the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I.

Overview and objectives

The initiative sought to assemble materials from families, Imperial War Museums, National Archives (United Kingdom), Library of Congress, Museum of the History of Poland, State Historical Museum (Moscow) and municipal archives to contextualise persons such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Émile Proudhon and Vasily Grossman. Objectives included enhancing access for scholars of the Treaty of Versailles, Zimmermann Telegram and Sykes–Picot Agreement while supporting exhibitions on events like the Christmas truce and personalities including T. E. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway and Marie Curie. The project promoted community digitisation alongside institutions such as UNESCO, European Commission and Council of Europe to foster preservation of letters, postcards, medals and uniforms linked to units like the British Expeditionary Force, French Army (1870–1914), Austro-Hungarian Army and Ottoman Army.

Launched in 2008 as a pilot within Europeana and supported by bodies including the JISC, Wellcome Trust, Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique and national ministries, development phases engaged partners such as the Imperial War Museum, Austrian State Archives, National Library of the Netherlands and Museo Centrale del Risorgimento. Early events gathered material from descendants of soldiers who fought at the Battle of Gallipoli, Battle of the Marne and Battle of Gallipoli (1915), and from families connected to leaders like Franz Ferdinand of Austria and Nicholas II of Russia. Subsequent funding rounds involved collaborations with research institutes such as Oxford University, University of Cambridge, Université de Paris, Humboldt University of Berlin and Leipzig University to standardise metadata and curation practices referencing documents related to the Ottoman–German Alliance, Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and Russian Revolution (1917).

Collections incorporated scanned items from the Imperial War Museum, personal diaries by soldiers from the Somme, letters mentioning the Battle of Jutland, postcards referencing the Zeebrugge Raid, and sheet music linked to composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst. Content included photographs of trenches, maps used by the British Army, enlistment papers for the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and artifacts from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, New Zealand Expeditionary Force and the Indian Army (British Indian Army). The repository preserved items tied to medical figures like Harold Gillies, to nursing organisations such as the Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service, and to humanitarian actors including the International Committee of the Red Cross and relief efforts following the Armenian Genocide. Collections also connected to political developments like the February Revolution, the October Revolution (1917), and postwar settlements including the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1919).

The project mobilised partners across Europe and beyond: national libraries such as the Royal Library, Denmark, National Library of Spain, Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal; museums including the Musée de l'Armée, Deutsches Historisches Museum, War Museum (Brussels) and Auckland War Memorial Museum; and archives like the Bundesarchiv, State Archive of Belgium and Polish State Archives. Universities including Trinity College Dublin, Universidade de Coimbra, Charles University in Prague and University of Vienna contributed digitisation expertise, while organisations such as the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, Commonwealth War Graves Commission and Fondation Napoléon supported contextual linking. Community partners included local historical societies, regimental associations linked to the Royal Scots, Le Régiment de Languedoc, K.u.k. Landwehr veterans groups and family associations of figures such as John McCrae and Violet Jessop.

Technical infrastructure relied on interoperability standards promoted by Europeana Collections, metadata schemas akin to Dublin Core implementations used by the Digital Public Library of America and harvesting protocols compatible with the Open Archives Initiative. Digitisation workflows followed guidelines by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions and employed optical character recognition used in projects at the British Library and Bibliothèque nationale de France. Access mechanisms included multilingual interfaces for researchers in institutions like Sorbonne University, Heidelberg University, UCL and KU Leuven, and outreach used exhibitions at venues such as the National Army Museum (United Kingdom), Imperial War Museum North and touring displays coordinated with European Commission cultural programmes.

Scholars in fields addressing the Treaty of Trianon, Irish War of Independence, Arab Revolt (1916–1918) and the social history of the Home Front used the archive for studies by academics at King's College London, University of Edinburgh, Free University of Berlin and Università di Bologna. Public reception involved family donations from descendants of participants in the Battle of Loos, Battle of Caporetto and the Siege of Tsingtao, and the project informed commemorative programmes by municipal councils in Ypres, Verdun and Gallipoli. Reviews in media outlets referencing exhibitions at the Science Museum, London, Musée d'Orsay and Victoria and Albert Museum noted contributions to understanding figures such as Jean Jaurès, Vladimir Lenin and Paul von Hindenburg, and to pedagogy used in curricula at École normale supérieure and St Andrews University.