New portals for new sources and new historians: European History Primary Sources, EHPS

Abstract

Free access to scholarly internet documentation is today heavily challenged by private corporations especially within an important area of scholarly documentation, the field of out-of-copyright materials which is also the core business of Google and many National Libraries Worldwide. Important international commercial firms are more and more determining how researchers should access primary sources and secondary literature. This is why Cultural institutions - museums, archives, libraries, history associations, universities, etc.- should create small scale digital projects to support research in Digital Humanities and History. Confronted with these new digital primary source, these artifacts and 'invented' archives, the craft of historians is deeply evolving within a new Digital era. The emphasis should be on the role of small scale cultural institutions offering free access to such scholarly documentation: moreover, retrieving such digital sources fits into the new digital working stage of the historian and new 'entries' to this documentation is needed. The European Primary Sources Portal EHPS, [http://primary-sources.eui.eu], was created under the auspices of the European University Institute’s History Department and Library for supporting its doctoral and post-doctoral programs. It’s a portal serving a community of Ph.D. researchers, post-doctoral fellows and professors (at the Department of History and Civilisation of the European University Institute, Florence, Italy), its users, with an easily searchable index of multi-lingual collections of scholarly websites that offer online access to digitised primary sources, invented archives and born digital sources related to the history of Europe, either as a whole or for individual countries. EHPS offers web 2.0. features to remain connected to the portal and be informed about new entries. EHPS is referencing only freely accessible primary sources in a digital world always more the 'property' of private and commercial actors.