European History Primary Sources (EHPS) is a joint initiative of the Library and the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. It is also part of the WWW Virtual Library History Central Catalogue that is hosted at the EUI.

The purpose of EHPS is to provide an easily searchable index of scholarly digital repositories that contain primary sources for the history of Europe. As the number of digital archives on the internet continues to grow, finding and selecting digital repositories becomes increasingly difficult. EHPS strives to fill that gap by listing the most important collections of digital primary sources for the history of Europe, either as a whole or for single countries. EHPS is updated continuously and we invite all users to send us their suggestions for websites to include.

While not claiming to be complete, EHPS contains the major national digital libraries and many smaller series of e-sources and smaller digitization projects in Europe. It thus reflects to a considerable extent the current state of digitization of historical source materials in Europe, as well as those digitized outside Europe pertaining to its history. EHPS offers the possibility to analyze the major trends in terms of how materials have been digitized to date and in which digital library context they are offered to the public. It queries essential methodological problems dealing with the use of primary documents in the field of digital history and, when possible, aims to regroup the fragmented reality of digital libraries in a multi-national and multi-cultural environment inside the portal. As far as history of Europe and primary sources are concerned, EHPS would like to collect and connect altogether this heavily atomized reality of digital contents in many languages.

EHPS was made with the open source content management system Drupal using the CTI Flex theme. The site is best viewed with Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. Internet Explorer 7 or 8, Opera, Google Chrome, Camino and Omniweb also work but IE 6 is not recommended. The EHPS logo was designed by Matthijs van Woerkum.

Current team:

• Serge Noiret: coordinator, managing editor.
• Gerben Zaagsma: design, technical maintenance, editor.
• Marius Buning: contributor.

For general feedback and questions please contact us here.

History:

The EHPS project was created for the History Department in 2009 by Dr. Serge Noiret, History Information Specialist at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy, who is the EHPS coordinator. Since its launch EHPS has benefitted from the voluntary work of a team of collaborators that belong to the EUI HEC Department: Sabina Cismas, Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol and Cristina Bianco Sio-Lopez contributed during the year 2010 and Sophie Heynssens from October 2010 to June 2011. Since April 2011 Marius Buning is a regular contributor. EHPS was built, designed and is maintained by Dr. Gerben Zaagsma, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences, Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands.