Institution Manager manual - Manage your institution
Contents
Your institution has a specific place in the archival landscape of your country, given by your country manager who manages it. This archival landscape is the entry point to the 3-layer structure -country, institution, archival content- of the portal. It is the first level of this hierarchical structure, on which the navigation tree structure of the advanced search as well as the directory of the portal are based. So once you start using the Dashboard and you log in into your institution manager account for the first time, the first thing you have to do is to provide information on your institution:
You are asked to provide an EAG file, either by creating one or by uploading one. All information about the EAG standard can be found over here. The schema for creating an EAG file in XML format is available over here: http://www.archivesportaleurope.net/Portal/profiles/eag_2012.xsd.
Upload an EAG file
If you already have an EAG file (either from your own environment, or created within the Data Preparation Tool), you can upload it in the Dashboard. The Dashboard will check if the file is valid and compliant, and in case some mandatory information is missing, you will be asked to provide it before saving the file.
Create an EAG file
To create an EAG file, you have to fill in a form, consisting of 7 tabs, ordered as in the ISDIAH standard, on which the EAG standard is based: Identity, Contact, Access and services, Description, Control, Relations. The mandatory fields are all grouped on the first tab, and the name of your institution is pre-filled:
For a complete description and explanation of all the elements and options of an EAG file, please see the EAG guide that describes each element: http://www.apex-project.eu/images/docs/D2.6D4.8_mapping-guide_apeEAD.pdf.
Within the EAG creation form only four fields are mandatory:
- Identifier/ISIL code
- Street
- City/Town (Postalcode)
- Opening hours
Specific attention should be given to the identifier of your institution. If you have an ISIL code please use it as identifier. If you don't have an ISIL code and can't obtain one, but you have a unique identifier that is ISO 3166 compliant, you can use that also. If you don't have an identifier at all, then an internal identifier is automatically generated by the Dashboard.
An identifier should ideally consist of two characters for the country code, a hyphen and up to 11 alphanumeric characters. For instance:
- National archives of The Netherlands = NL-HaNA
- Archives départementales de la Vendée = FR-FRAD085
The mandatory information filled in the first tab is automatically copied to the corresponding next tabs, for instance: the name of the institution is copied to the Identity tab and the opening hours information is copied to the Access and service tab. In these tabs you can add extra information related to the mandatory information.
If your institution runs several repositories, for instance the headquarters and different branches, you can add them one after the other by clicking on the "Add new repository" button. You then have to fill-in the same information as for the main repository. Each repository is then managed in its specific tab, and the display in the directory shows all of them.
Once you have uploaded an EAG file or created one using the EAG creation form and successfully saved that, you get more options available in your institution manager account:
