The Central Institute for the Single Directory of the Italian Libraries and for bibliographic information(ICCU) is the technical-scientific reference institution of the Department of books, cultural institutions and copyright, which institutionally promote and coordinates the cataloguing and documentation of the Book Heritage kept in public libraries.
On 8th August 2013 the Task Force of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers signed the memorandum of understanding with the ICCU that – together with the Institute for the History of the Italian Risorgimento, the Central National Library of Rome, The Alexandrine University Library and the Library of Modern and Contemporary History – developed the portal “14-18 Documents and Images of the Great War”.
The portal, continuously updated through the contribution of a growing number of Italian institutions, presently contains nearly 140,000 images, and represents one of the most important bibliographic, iconographic and documentary collections on this subject.
Finally, the portal 14-18 represents the national infrastructure collecting and providing the Italian data on the First World War to Europeana, the digital library gathering the digitalised contributions of the 28 EU countries in 30 languages.
By 2014, the year of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, Europeana will establish a digital archive with the material coming from the national collections of ten libraries, besides the other partners from the eight European Countries involved in the world conflict.