Posted on 14 March 2014
The Historical Archives of the European Union assists the Secretariat General of the European Commission in publishing on the online database DORIE digitised historical documents on institutional issues of the European Communities since their foundation.
More than 40,000 records (representing a great range of documents or excerpts of documents) have so far been made available to the public interested in EU institutional matters, and the numbers are steadily growing. With 17,000 users in 2013, this online database is particularly used by students and academic researchers, journalists and European Think Tanks.
DORIE stands for DOcumentation et Recherche sur les questions Institutionnelles Européennes. The database contains documents held by the European Commission, such as meeting minutes, internal notes, contributions, letters, press articles and press releases, and public speeches of European leaders on a variety of issues of interest to the European Communities.
This unique collection has accrued over the years around two groups of documents: the first group was established in the 1970s around institutional issues since the origins of the Communities; the second collection starts in the 1990s and concerns major intergovernmental conferences, including the 2002-2003 constitutional convention, that have made changes to the founding treaties.
In order to preserve the Commission’s institutional memory and expertise, 2.700 archival folders, totalling 1.300.000 pages, with relevant documents were digitised in 2005.
Search on the DORIE database can be performed either by simple keyword search or by advanced search in a variety of fields, such as document title, type of document, date, media type (newspaper, journal, website), conference, author or institution name and themes from a controlled vocabulary provided in a directory tree. The database also provides a full text search within the digitised documents.
For historical reasons many documents, some of which date back to the early days of the European Communities, are only available in French or English.
Consult the DORIE database