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, like one to download your EAG file:
Other options you have now available related to managing your institution are:
- Manage open data for API
- Change institutions name
- Set feedback e-mail address
Manage open data for API
Since May 2016 the Archives Portal Europe has an API () available, which can provide data
Change the name of your institution
Though possible and easy to achieve, the change of the name of your institution should be handle very carefully because it is not only used in the EAG file, but in a lot of places in the Archives Portal Europe's framework. Besides, you should always report such changes to your Country Manager. Please note that the change of the name can be done only if no content is published in the portal nor converted to EDM. Therefore, you have to unpublish everything before and republish everything after the change, including producing the EDM files.
Set feedback e-mail address
Users have the possibility to contact the archival institutions which have content published via the portal. They can do that via a form, which is available in the 2nd Display at every search result level. By default, the Institution Manager receives these emails, but it is possible to redirect this feedback to the email address of another person, preferably someone who has thorough knowledge of the archival fonds and collections. This redirecting can be done by filling in the email address of the person who can take care of feedback email in the option Set feedback e-mail address.
Please note that this field is mandatory: if left blank, the Institution Manager's email address will be used automatically again.
