News from the Great War
Target group:
the general public and scientific researchers
Breaking news from 1914, missing persons notices, and adverts for cigarettes for 0.85 francs: you can read it all in the News from the Great War collection. Our large-scale digitisation campaign rescued over 270,000 pages of First World War Belgian newspaper content and made it accessible online in 2015.
You can browse through scans of the newspapers, and also search and read the text created by OCR (Optical Character Recognition) at nieuwsvandegrooteoorlog.hetarchief.be. This search function has been enhanced even further by linking our collection to the List of Names from the In Flanders Fields Museum. We also want to focus on the application of IIIF in the near future, to make the images from the newspapers more universally accessible and searchable on the website.
Blogs on a wide selection of topics are accompanied by collections of newspapers that are relevant to these themes. It’s the place to browse if you want to know more or dive deeper into this large-scale conflict.
A large scale digitisation project
Coordinated by meemoo, the Flemish Institute for Archives, and in consultation with the Flanders Heritage Library and FARO, 13 Flemish cultural heritage institutions spent two years making an inventory of and digitising hundreds of thousands of newspaper pages from 1914-1918, and publishing them online. The News from the Great War collection safeguards the information from these fragile newspapers for future generations, and makes the heritage from the First World War available internationally in digital form.
