Archives Portal Europe

Archives Portal Europe is a project that was developed in the early 2000s by European archivists working together across borders. Their goal was to make each other’s national archive materials more accessible through use of the internet. Although technically governed under Dutch law, since 2015, the Archives Portal Europe Foundation (APEF) has guided the project and its allocated budget.

Archives Portal Europe is a digital space for collaboration and knowledge sharing among researchers, archive professionals, teachers, and students. This website presents records from dozens of countries, in over 20 languages, and from around 7000 diverse archival institutions total including the national archives of dozens of countries and smaller institutions like Arhiv Republike Slovenije, Cambridge University Library, and the Women’s Library Archive. By prioritizing collaboration, Archives Portal Europe brings all of these collections together on one, easy to use site.

Because the Portal includes sources from so many different countries across the European continent, materials you find here can be used for lessons in countless World History topics. The Portal makes accessible things like digitized Allied Power agreements regarding the Treaty of Versailles, which could be useful for a unit about World War I. Rare photos of Pablo Picasso displayed on the site could enrich a lesson on art history, the Spanish Civil War, or even Communism and the Soviet Union. Photos of the Romani people from the 1930s and 1940s could be used as part of a lesson on the Holocaust.

To browse the site’s contents, consult the Explore tab. There you’ll see that the portal has organized its materials into Highlights and Topics.

Highlights are digital exhibits that show off interesting and unique material. These are frequently updated with new Highlights being added about every month or two. A few examples of available Highlights include, Olympic Archives, Pets in Archives, and The Asia Minor Catastrophe. Olympic Archives displays curated photos of athletes, newspaper articles, local visitors guides, and more from within the portal telling stories of athleticism, culture, and politics through the Olympic games 1896-1992. Pets in Archives showcases a photo of a person demining with their dog in Mozambique in the 1990s, a French drawing of a cat in the early 1880s, an image of the Queen of Romania on her favorite horse during WWI, and more. The Asia Minor Catastrophe includes a brief history of the catastrophe as well as documents and images of war-torn Greece, highlighting fallen structures, the military, and civilian life with sources provided by the General State Archives of Greece. The Fake News Highlight showcases sources and tells the story of falsifying documents and lying from as far back as the Middle Ages all the way through the late 1960s. Some highlights include more background information than others, but all of them include sources with citations that could be included in some part of a lesson.

Topics group together sources and material from various archives pertaining to the same subject such as Agriculture, Aristocracy, or Economics. Each Topic page will invite you to “Search within topic.” Here, any search you make will automatically pull out only sources within your specific topic. For example, when searching “Germany” within the Aristocracy Topic, only sources about German royalty will appear. Please note, many topics are still being created and only material from certain countries or in certain languages have been sorted into those groups. That being said, if you cannot find something by searching within a Topic, that does not mean it’s not on the site, it may just have not been sorted yet. Try searching with keywords and filters instead.

Using the search function can be particularly useful if you need sources in a particular language or from a particular country. Choose from the drop down menu which countries you would like to include in your search and enter any keyword or topic. The left column will show other ways to filter results including Document Type, Institutions, and containing Digital objects.

Overall, Archives Portal Europe is a fantastic site for world history educators across the globe. The wide variety of sources, archives, and languages makes it very unique and well equipped to serve researchers and educators alike. Source material in the Portal could be easily used for higher-level primary source analysis activities or differentiated for any level of instruction.