CM manual Introduction

The Archives Portal Europe publishes information on the archival material offered by its content providers via the back-end of the portal, called: the Dashboard. Each content provider, i.e. content contributing institution, gets an account for the Dashboard to upload, process and publish its content itself. Per country a so called Country Manager is responsible for registering and administering these individual content provider accounts. An overview of the Country Managers can be found here. This manual describes and explains the different tasks to be performed by the Country Manager (CM) and how the specific functionalities of the Dashboard support him/her in this.

Country Manager tasks

All countries represented within the APE network are to nominate a Country Manager. This role is most likely to be fulfilled by the Beneficiaries and/or Associated Partners. Since there only can be one Country Manager per country, this role has to be negotiated within each country in case there would be more than one institution or organisation suitable for taking the related responsibility. The Country Manager does not necessarily need to be an active member of the APEx project team of her/his institution, but s/he preferably is someone generally involved in (inter)national activities of the institution. The Country Managers will be the APEx project’s link to the future, ie continuing the Archives Portal Europe after the three years of the project. The Country Manager therefore is a key person in each country, because the different WP will need her/his help to achieve their goals: mainly WP5 and 7 for whom the Country Manager will act as the main contact point and in which he will play a major part in all activities related to expanding the network of Content Providers, to dissemination and to training. Ideally, the Country Manages would be from the national archives or archives administration of her/his country respectively designated by them, possibly involved in a national archives portal if existing and possibly engaged in branch organisations in her/his country. S/he is responsible for:

• Providing information on the archival landscape of the country (creating and maintaining);
• Assisting in gathering information on the archival institutions (D5.4);
• Providing a first level of information and formation for the Content Providers;
• Gathering demands and needs of the institutions, and maybe, through these, the ones of end-users;
• Assisting in the implementation of any new standard (EAC-CPF / METS, etc.) by either providing the core APE group more information on an already existing implementation in her/his country or by learning from the APE implementations and trying to spread the word about it in her/his own institution/country;
• Possibly acting as a mediator between the APE team (PB for organisation, WP3 for upload/harvesting, WP5 for data conversion, WP2 for link to Europeana) and existing national archival portals or national Europeana aggregators facilitating a specific archives’ branche;
• Possibly acting as a mediator between software companies for software used by archival institutions, helping both (supplier and customer) in standardising their formats towards the APE standards, and in coming up with exports or conversion compliant with the APE standards;
• Acting as contact person for any PR activities in her/his country (f.i. regarding translating general project PR texts or by organising national workshops and events);
• Acting as contact person for monitoring the translations for front-end and back-end texts of the APE;
• Acting as first “casual” tester and reporting problems in order to include an “outsider’s view” on the project’s developments;
• facilitating a general survey of her/his country (with WP5) and monitoring the progress (with WP1).

Defining the role of the Country Manager from a technical point of view, s/he will maintain the Country Manager account on the dashboard of the Archives Portal Europe. This allows her/him to configure and maintain the archival landscape of her/his country and to provide institutions managers’ accounts to other Content Providers from her/his country. The Country Manager can also be the institution manager of her/his own institution, therefore being responsible for uploading its content. To be able to live up to this role, the Country Manager will be kept informed on all project developments by the APE team, trained if/when necessary by giving specific actions or workshops and provided with “information packages” (in collaboration between WP5 and 7), that they can use within the archival community of their country. The Country Managers will be granted their own community platform within the APEx project website and there will be project activities especially dedicated at the Country Managers’ needs (f.i. workshops, seminars). In addition, the Country Managers can send one representative of their group to PB meetings.