Europeana 1914-1918 and the "Collection Days". An Appointment in Pordenone

Among the digital projects that try to collect and connect "cultural heritage" the one of Europeana collections 1914-1918 is for sure of the most prominent. The main "tool" to grow these collections has become the so called "collection days", public initiatives modeled as a road show where people can meet experts and bring their memorabilia (postcards, letters, relics, documents etc) on the spot and start in this way a digitalization process, the beginning of shared knowledge. The next collection day in Italy will take place in Pordenone, in the region of Friuli, be during the literary festival Pordenonelegge, the next 21st of September. The preparation of the event is by WW1-dentro la Grande Guerra Cultural Association, that we already met in the words of the interview with Emanuela Zilio. Like she said "“Europeana 1914-1918 - Your family history of World War One” is another amazing operation which surprised even the project leaders because of the huge amount of memories people are bringing out all around Europe. Europeana DB is open and its contents, as well as WW1 ones, go under the Creative Commons Licence CC BY – NC – SA."
Here below is the press release (pre-registration is recommended at this link).

COLLECTION DAY AT pordenonelegge
Pordenone, Italy - September 21, 2013

In preparation to the 100th anniversary of World War One in 2014, WW1-dentro la Grande Guerra Cultural Association, responsible for the immersive platform of the same name, and pordenonelegge.it have set up a new Collection Day, whose scope includes both Italy and Europe, to be held in one of the “hottest” regions of the conflict, Friuli Venezia Giulia.

In recent years Europeana, the digital European archive-library-museum, has started a major task of digitizing, preserving and publishing records and documents from the Great War.

The WW1 project connects the public contents coming from the archives of the Companies that made our Country’s History with those from the Defense Ministry’s Historical Archive as well as from the Popular Writing Archives, from Onorcaduti and Europeana’s private memories collection.
The cultural legacy of the soldiers who served in World War I -  both casualties and survivors, will be made available to the public thanks to the precious work iStoreco and Cimeetrincee have developed in recent years and to the collaboration of sympathetic associations like the Military Historical Center (MHC) of Udine, Italy, which have always cared about the "human" issue.

The new technologies provide a strategic language to reach a wide public because they create an easy and immediate access to issues often perceived as difficult or “bookish” and mostly uninteresting.

During World War One the Italian Army recruited over five million men, mostly “peasant-soldiers”. The casualties amounted to nearly 600,000, a huge death toll. In our regions, Friuli Venezia Giulia, Veneto, Trentino and Lombardy the whole population suffered the war directly, was evacuated, suspected to be pro-Italy or pro-Austria, imprisoned, and deeply scarred by this experience. Every Italian family of a hundred years ago lost some of its members in the war, whose memory every family today keeps and cherishes.

Now everybody can contribute to the preservation of his/her family narratives back in that critical time and share and disseminate them.