Concept Archives Portal Europe
Contents
storage of metdata and links to digital objects
The Archives Portal Europe collects and stores only metadata (finding aids), not digital archival objects. Those remain on the storage facilities of the individual archival institutions, the content providers, and the portal links back to them in case the metadata it receives (finding aids) contain links to those digital archival objects.
use of international archival standards
The portal fosters the use of internationally accepted archival metadata standards, such as EAD en EAC-CPF, and has defined a workflow based on standardising the use of these standards. All that is asked from content providers is that they provide their metadata according to these standards, but they will not be foreced to change the way they use these standards: the Archives Portal Europe technical team has developed implementation guidelines for each of those standards, based on a comparison of the best practices of the participating archival institutions, so in fact it has established a common denominator for each standard. This was necessary to be able to publish all metadata from all countries and all institutions, with small standards implementation differences, as consistent as possible. This standardisation of the use of standards has been taken care of by providing mapping stylesheets, which convert any local standards implementation into the common formats used by the Archives Portal Europe. More on the use of the international archival standards by the Archives Portal Europe can be found in the Standards section of this Wiki.
