Archives Portal Europe
Archives Portal Europe (APE) is the portal for online access to the European archival material. It is currently the largest archival catalogue in the world, allowing to research and access the archival documents held in more than 1000 institutions from 32 countries, thanks to the aggregation and integration of finding aids and holding guides, with links to digitised documents. Archives Portal Europe also acts as an aggregator for Europeana.
The Portal is based on a network of national archives and other institutions that adhere and contribute to the project at different levels. The objective of the Portal is to provide a single online access point to all archival documents related to the history of Europe; any institution that holds relevant archival material can use it as a free publication platform.
Holdings and research[edit]
In March 2018, the Portal held more than 260 million descriptions of archival from more than 1000 institutions (“Content Providers”) based in 32 different countries; however, the Portal is updated with new entries almost on a daily basis, and thousands of institutions are involved with ingestion plans to upload information on their holdings in the Portal. The Portal is freely accessible online at the address www.archivesportaleurope.net and it is translated in all languages of the contributing countries (currently 24 languages). Furthermore, it supports multilingual search through wildcards and boolean operators. Documents can be searched by keywords, selected topics, country or institution. Search results may contain links to digitisation of the archival material; in this case it is possible to access the documents directly via the Portal. Users can also create a personal profile for bookmarking search results, saving search queries, and sharing search references and findings. A series of tutorials on the Portal’s YouTube channel explains how to conduct research using the Portal.[1].
History[edit]
The architecture of Archives Portal Europe was created thanks to two projects funded by the European Commission[2]: the “APEnet” (Archives Portal Europe network, 2009-2012) project, and later the APEx (Archives Portal Europe network of excellence, 2012-2015) project. At the end of the APEx project, the Archives Portal Europe Foundation (APEF) was established to guarantee the sustainability of the Portal, further develop its functionalities, and to expand its network of Content Providers.
APEnet (2009-2012)[edit]
The project to develop a Portal for online access to archival documents was started by the APEnet[3] (Archives Portal Europe network) consortium in 2009, thanks to the support of the European Commission. In the beginning, the APEnet consortium consisted of 12 national archives from European countries, as well as Europeana Foundation; at the end of the project, 5 more national archives had joined. The first version of Archives Portal Europe was released in January 2011 and already contained more than 8 million descriptions of archival documents from 49 European archival institutions.
APEx (2012-2015)[edit]
After APEnet, a second three-year EU-sponsored project was implemented under the name of APEx, acronym for Archives Portal Europe network of eXcellence, which focused on adding extra functionalities to the Portal and expanding its network of Content Providers both horizontally (i.e., getting more countries involved) and vertically (i.e., encouraging more institutions for each country to publish their content).[4] At the end of the APEx project, the national archives of 32 European countries were partner of the APEx consortium, resulting in more than 700 institutions providing access via the Portal, which held about 240 million descriptions of archival documents.
Archives Portal Europe Foundation[edit]
At the end of the APEx project, in October 2015, the Archives Portal Europe Foundation (APEF) was established as an independent, self-funded network of archival institutions. APEF is a non-profit organisation based in the Netherlands, with the objective of managing, disseminating, and constantly developing the Archives Portal Europe. APEF works with two main governing entities: the “Assembly of Associates” and the “Governing Board”. The Assembly of Associates is the representative and decision-making body encompassing all participants of the Foundation. It oversees the policy of the Governing Board and the general course of affairs in the Foundation. The Governing Board is charged with the day-to-day management of the Foundation and its business and is entitled to enter into agreements with others on behalf of the Foundation, where appropriate. Furthermore, each country participating in APEF is represented by a Country Manager, who promotes the Portal both amongst archival institutions and researchers, and liaises between the Foundation, its technical and PR staff, and all institutions interested in providing content for the Portal (the “Content Providers”).
Technical characteristics[edit]
Archives Portal Europe is based on the international archival standards EAD, EAC-CPF, Encoded Archival Guide (EAG) and METS. EAD is based on ISAD(G) (General International Standard Archival Description) and is used for creating online inventories of archival collections, the so-called finding aids. EAC-CPF is based on ISAAR-CPF (International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families) and is the standard for describing archival records creators. EAG, based on ISDIAH (International Standard for Describing Institutions with Archival Holdings) can be used to describe all archival institutions, like their address, contact details and facilities.
The technology of the Portal enables automatic harvesting and processing of existing structured archival metadata provided by archival institutions. These are able to run the harvesting and processing functionalities themselves via dedicated access to the backend of the Portal, providing them with full control over how their metadata will be published in Archives Portal Europe.
Technical documentation on the Dashboard tools and their functionalities can be found in the Archives Portal Europe Wiki[5]. The code of the Portal and the Dashboard is available on GitHub under the European Union Public Licence [6]. The APEF YouTube channel also provides tutorials on how to ingest material in the Portal[7]
Associate members[edit]
The following institutions are currently involved in APEF as associate members:[citation needed]
- State Archives in Belgium
- Archives State Agency of the Republic of Bulgaria
- National Archives of Denmark
- National Archives of Estonia
- National Archives of France
- Federal Archives of Germany
- National Archives of Hungary
- Directorate-General of Archives of Italy
- National Archives of Latvia
- Office of the Chief Archivist of Lithuania
- National Archives of Luxemburg
- National Archives of Malta
- National Archives of The Netherlands
- National Archives of Norway
- Department of Archives and Registries, Ministry of Interior of the Slovak Republic
- State Archives of Slovenia
- Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of Spain
- National Archives of Sweden
- Swiss Federal Archives
- The National Archives
External links[edit]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ � https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsRb2rwCngo
- ↑ "European Commission : CORDIS : Projects and Results : Archives Portal Europe network of eXcellence". cordis.europa.eu.
- ↑ "Welcome to the APEnet project website". www.apenet.eu.
- ↑ "APEx project - Home". www.apex-project.eu.
- ↑ "Archives Portal Europe Wiki". wiki.archivesportaleurope.net.
- ↑ "Archives Portal Europe Foundation". GitHub.
- ↑ Archives Portal Europe (12 October 2017). "How to upload and process data in Archives Portal Europe" – via YouTube.
This article "Archives Portal Europe" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Archives Portal Europe. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
