Florence, 8 June 2009

The Department of History and Civilization and the Library of the European University Institute, Florence, are pleased to announce the official launch of European History Primary Sources (EHPS), an index of scholarly websites that offer on-line access to primary sources on the history of Europe from Medieval and Early Modern History up to the most recent history of the European integration process.

The purpose of European History Primary Sources is to provide historians with an easily searchable index of websites that offer online access to primary sources on the history of Europe. As the number of digital archives and collections on the internet continues to grow, maintaining an overview becomes increasingly difficult. EHPS strives to fill that gap by selecting the most important collections of digital primary sources for the history of Europe, either as a whole or for individual countries.

EHPS is updated continuously and several collaborative features are introduced in the portal. It is very easy to stay updated on new entries and registered users can bookmark entries, leave comments to add their experiences to the descriptions on EHPS listed websites, complete EHPS abstracts with their own individual experiences and suggest new websites to be included.

Since the launch of a beta version in September 2008, EHPS has already attracted significant interest from historians. In order to improve the user experience you are invited to send your feedback and suggestions so that the portal can be developed further.

The portal was built and is maintained by Dr. Gerben Zaagsma (University College London) with the open source content management system Drupal.

To visit the portal go to: http://primary-sources.eui.eu/. To contact EHPS please send an email to: primary-sources.info@eui.eu.

The coordinator of the EHPS project,
Dr. Serge Noiret,
History Information Specialist, EUI Library
Email: serge.noiret@eui.eu