European History Primary Sources

Website review: http://primary-sources.eui.eu/

As opposed to the websites we had to review for the previous sessions, ‘European History Primary Sources’ (EHPS) offered rather little to talk about in terms of narratives. This is quite simply due to the concept behind the website itself: as an index of scholarly digital repositories of primary sources, its aim is to make it easier for students and researchers to find material in the ever-growing ‘jungle’ of digital archives and repositories. As such though, this website does not offer any narratives of its own.

A point I would like to pick up on is the list of countries covered by the different repositories featured on EHPS. When looking at the list (http://primary-sources.eui.eu/country), one can clearly see that the term ‘European’ in the title of the project refers to Europe as a continent rather than to Europe as a political entity. Even Turkey and Russia, two countries which have most of their territory stretching onto the Asian continent, are represented. In a historical context, such a wide definition of Europe obviously makes sense and needs no further explanation. When watching the news though, one can nowadays often hear and see a distinction being made between Europe (actually meaning the European Union) and Russia, most noticeably in the context of the Ukraine conflict. This implicitly suggests a much narrower view of what ‘Europe’ is. So, while professional historians and even history students should find it obvious that Russia belongs on a list of European countries in a historical context, that might not be the case for parts of the general public. As ‘democratisation’ of historical knowledge and of access to historical sources are among the most frequent self-proclaimed goals of digitisation projects around the globe, it becomes ever more important to also allow the new target audiences to contextualise what they can find. Including Russia and Turkey on a list of European countries is obviously a minute step in that direction, but I nonetheless found it interesting enough to be pointed out here, especially because last week, I already wrote about diverging definitions of the term ‘Europe’.

Perhaps again pointing out the obvious, I would still like to stress the importance of having a central hub for accessing the vast amount of digital archives that have sprouted across the world wide web in recent years. Unfortunately though, the search function on EHPS is underwhelming. Rather than display digitally available source material immediately, it merely indicates which repositories have material related to the entered keyword(s). Apart from not generating many results on even the most general queries (e.g. “world war 1” only generating seven hits: http://primary-sources.eui.eu/free-text-search?search_api_views_fulltext=world+war+1), the optical presentation is also far from perfect. All things considered, I think that the current search mechanism on EHPS limits its utility tremendously.

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