Europe ‘s largest online collection of art, culture, and science www.europeana.eu is providing the collections of Europe’s famous and not so famous libraries, museums, galleries and archives. Commemorating the beginning of the First World War in 1914, Europeana aims to accumulate private memories of people across Europe online.

www.europeana1914-1918.eu brings together resources from three major European projects each dealing with different types of First World War material. The result is an archive that allows the national collections of libraries to sit beside personal stories and treasures and important film archives. In collaboration with the University of Oxford, Facts & Files and many other partners across Europe, Europeana 1914-1918 was collecting the public’s previously unpublished letters, photographs and keepsakes from the war to be digitised and shared online. People could bring along documents, artefacts and stories from the First World War so they can be scanned or photographed and added to the archive. Another possibility to share the objects and documents by material was by uploading items directly to the website http://europeana1914-1918.eu.

Starting in Germany in 2011, we collected memorabilia in digital form from many of the countries involved in the First World War. Four crossborder German-Polish collection days took place in November 2014. These collection days were organized by the Europeana Foundation, the Minister of State in the Federal Chancellery and Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media and Facts & Files.

Until 2018, collection days in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Poznań, Poland, Brno and Prag, Czech Republic, Italy, Hungary, and Cyprus were organised by Europeana.