As a custodian of millennial knowledge and experiences passed down from generation to generation, the library evokes a sense of collective consciousness at first sight. There is a structural and vital, by no means accidental, alignment between our psychological and cultural heritage. Memory, especially collective memory, allows the spirit of our species to remain unchanged throughout time, shaping future generations. Memory serves as a source of inspiration and creativity – many ideas owe their existence to it. Moreover, it determines what will become immortal. Libraries' role is to help make ideas indestructible. They are repositories of confessions from members of many generations, and within these confessions, memory is directly contained and expressed. Therefore, memory as a phenomenon has as many copies as there are members of the human species who transmit it, so it can perish only together with them. The National Library of Serbia is an institution that, by definition, preserves knowledge, information and memories in the broadest sense of the word. Everything that constitutes the most significant civilizational achievements, events, thoughts and attitudes that have marked the course of history falls under its purview, whether it is sharing materials for research or being part of the research process. The National Library is also the oldest cultural institution in Serbia. Regardless of being the largest and leading library in the country with the obligation to remember, such remembrance is not just a mere duty but also an inherent trait of the institution.

Đuro Daničić (1825–1882) was a Serbian philologist, lexicographer, and translator, a professor at the Lyceum, a librarian at the National Library, and the first secretary of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts (JAZU). He was born as Đorđe Popović into a priestly family in Novi Sad, where he began his education, later continuing his studies in Pozsony, Pest, and Vienna. Initially, he enrolled in law studies, but under the influence of Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and Franz Miklosich, he switched to Slavic philology. His friendship with Vuk would prove to be decisive: with his support, Daničić fully dedicated himself to language studies and, at just twenty-two years old, published one of the most significant works of Serbian philology of that time – Rat za srpski jezik i pravopis (The War for the Serbian Language and Orthography) 1847. Due to strict Austro-Hungarian censorship, he signed the book with the pseudonym Đuro Daničić, taken from a hero in Serbian folk literature. That same year, which is considered a turning point in the victory of Vuk's language reform, also saw the publication of Vuk’s translation of the Novi zavjet (New Testament), Gorski vijenac (The Mountain Wreath) by Petar Petrović Njegoš, and the Pesme (Poems) of Daničić’s friend and sworn brother, Branko Radičević.

The digital collection on the Great War has been created as part of the Europeana Collections 1914–1918 project. The project aimed to digitize and publicly display over 400,000 publications created during World War I. As a project partner, the National Library of Serbia created a thematic website to gather and present all wartime publications related to the Serbian people.