Europeana, which is a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe, will now count with Films about World War 1 that have never been seen outside a cinema or on television. These films are going to be available on the internet for the first time ever.

Films about World War 1 that have never been seen outside a cinema or on television are to be made available freely accessible via Europeana. The European Film Gateway 1914 (EFG1914), which is coordinated by the Deutsches Filminstitut on behalf of the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE), with support from the European Union plans to digitise up to 650 hours of footage and make it available via europeana.eu, the Europe’s digital library, museum and archive that counted in November 2010 with 14 million European cultural heritage pieces on-line.

The footage includes newsreels, documentary films and footage as well as fiction films from and about World War 1. It is being digitised by archives across Europe, including the Imperial War Museum in London - which has one of the largest institutional World War 1 related collections - along with partners in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Spain and the Netherlands.

Europeana, which is a single access point to millions of books, paintings, films, museum objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe, in addition of an authoritative source of information coming from European cultural and scientific institutions. Project organisers are sharing hundreds of hours of film material and expertise from a number of individual European archives in order to highlight the benefits of film digitisation and digital preservation of historical films across the sector.