24 March 2011 – Today Europeana launched a new project entitled “Erster Weltkrieg in Alltagsdokumenten” (“The First World War in everyday documents”) with a call to the public in Germany to participate in building a digital European archive by contributing private memorabilia from the First World War.
The project is looking for photographs, letters, diaries, short films, audio recordings and the stories connected to those objects. People interested in contributing World War 1 memorabilia can bring them to one of the four roadshows that will take place in Frankfurt am Main (31 March), Berlin (2 April), Munich (6 April) and Stuttgart (12 April). There, the objects will be digitised professionally and added to the online archive, along with corresponding descriptions. Independently of the roadshows, everyone can contribute their digitised images and information via www.europeana1914-1918.eu.
Until 2014, the year of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War 1, Europeana will collect memorabilia in digital form from many of the countries involved in the War. The project, which a partnership between Europeana, the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and Oxford University, aims to save people’s family memories of this tragedy that convulsed Europe and make them accessible to the world.
For further details, please see the full press release in German and in English.