Historiana Editor-in-Chief, Bob Stradling, recently gave a presentation at our Annual Conference in Poland in which he presented an overview of the development of the Historiana website and ongoing efforts to create more transnational source collections for use by history educators. He began with a retrospective look at the stages of development of the Historiana website. This commenced with the inception of the idea for a website for history educators in the early 2000s and was bolstered in 2013 by the formation of a partnership with Europeana – a collection of online sources from many libraries, archives, museums and other institutions around Europe with over 50 million digitised books, music, artworks and other sources. Historiana’s development continued with the creation of the eLearning Activity Builder and the generation of new content.
Bob then described the Historical Content Team’s ongoing endeavour to build a transnational source collection on the Russian Revolution. For this project, Europeana sources were supplemented by crowdsourced material from EuroClio’s community. The collection remains a work in progress and will be followed by the development of further collections in line with the results of a needs assessment of EuroClio members carried out by the Educational Research Institute in Warsaw which identified eleven priority areas for future collections.