Film digitisation project on WWI EFG1914 is the follow-up project of “EFG – The European Film Gateway”. It officially started on 15 February 2012 and will run for two years. 26 partners contribute to the project. Among them 20 film archives that will digitise up to 650 hours of film from and about World War I, and make the digitised film collections available on the Internet through the European Film Gateway  and the European digital library Europeana.The EFG1914 project website give more background information.

During the 1910s, a considerable amount of film material was produced, covering the events of the Great War. Today, the largest part of this historical material is considered lost: About four fifths of the  film production are estimated to not have survived until today. Many of the preserved films still rest only in analogue form and therefore access to these films still remains a cumbersome and costly task. With the help of EFG1914, this task is made easy and efficient through the digitizing the film material. The films are expected to become available over the next two years, just in time for the 2014 centenary of the First World War. At the same time, the project serves as a means of facilitating good practices of film digitization and digital preservation by pooling the individual archives’ considerable experience in this field.

EFG1914 is supported by the European Union under the ICT-PSP.