Revision as of 20:26, 29 April 2016

Three sources

When you are searching in the Archives Portal Europe, bear in mind that it contains three sources of content:

1. Archival materials ("archives") consisting of administrative records, documents, letters, maps, manuscripts, books and photos etc that you can consult in archival institutions. The information is provided in the form of finding aids, holdings guides and source guides, which provide information about those materials.

1. Information about person, family and corporate body entities ("names") such as Galileo Galilei, House of Habsburg and the East India Company. This source offers a new way of exploring a wide range of archival information. You can access archival materials through their creators or associated entities and you may find previously unknown relationships between the archives and entities.

1. Information about archival institutions in Europe. This is an extra source to find information about the institutions, which hold archival materials, as contact and service information is essential for your visit and consultation. You can also find further information such as the list of finding aids and holdings guides that an institution already has made available at the Archives Portal Europe.

In case you are interested in the data standards used for these contents, there is more information on them over here.

Simple search

This is the most popular way of searching the content. You can simply type keywords in the search box on the home page or on the search page.

APE IM manual, figure 1: Simple search and autocompletion

When typing the keywords, you will see some suggestions of terms with an indicator of the number of results. The suggestions when searching from the homepage also refer to what sources the results are from (archives, names and institutions).