It is a pleasure to announce that the Historical Archive of National Bank of Greece is the winner of the 2024 Digitisation Grant of the annual competition that has been established by the Archives Portal Europe (APE) with the purpose of promoting the digitisation of archival metadata of European interest and their subsequent ingestion to its repository. The Historical Archive participated in the process with the project "An initiative for clean energy by the National Bank of Greece in the first half of the 20th century: The case of "Lefkos Anthrax" (White Coal) Archive". The project must have been completed by the end of 2024. Upon its completion, the finding aids for the collections will have been prepared and ingested to the portal while the plans, the maps and the technical drawings will have been digitised and linked to the finding aids.
"White Anthrax" is a term used to refer to the water and waterfalls as a source of electricity during the 20th century; this archival collection held at the HA/NBG related to all stages of the bank's participation in the initiatives and research on the issue of hydroelectricity exploitation in Greece.
The archive is formed by a variety of documents, and it consists of 172 document files and 22 books, covering the period from 1906 to 1947. It includes, among others, studies on the hydroelectric capacity of rivers in the central and northern parts of Greece, as well as documents related to the general research on the issue of hydroelectricity, manuscripts and official reports covering a wide range of topics related to energy sources, power production, transmission, distribution, and consumption, articles written by scientists and experts working for the Committee for the Study of the Energy Sources of Greece (an initiative of NBG for the conduct of research on utilization of domestic energy sources and in particular hydropower and lignite), publications in the national press, reports on the development of hydropower generation internationally, records and data on the industrialization of Greece, studies on the potential uses of electric power for urban infrastructure, transport, plans, maps, and technical drawings.
The collection will be of particular interest to any historian of energy history and of financial history, as it shows the paramount importance of the National Bank of Greece in developing these energy infrastructures.
The abovementioned project initiates the collaboration between the Historical Archive of National Bank of Greece as content provider and the Archives Portal Europe (APE), a portal to the archival cultural heritage of Europe regarding both European archives and archives that highlight the European history. At the same time the APE acts as a data collation website (aggregator) for Europeana. In addition, it renders archives that are scattered all over the world easily accessible: to date, it has gathered descriptive archival metadata from more than 30 countries, in more than 20 languages (and 5 different alphabets) from a plethora of institutions (national archives, parish archives, university archives, cooperate and private archives).
The APE was established in 2015 by the Archives Portal Europe Foundation (APEF), a legal entity governed by Dutch legislation. It constitutes an open institution that is created and maintained by archivists, professionals in the field of cultural heritage as well as experts in digital editing of collections from various countries. Furthermore, it promotes collaboration between bodies and individuals wishing to contribute to its aim for facilitating access to the archival heritage of Europe.
