Institution Manager manual - Optional actions

The Archives Portal Europe's Dashboard offers some extra - optional - functionalities next to the ones that are necessary for the common workflow, these are:

• Create EAC-CPF files
• Manage topics
• Partially edit finding aids
• Create holding guides and source guides
• Convert data to EDM records and deliver those to Europeana

Create EAC-CPF files

An introduction to Encoded Archival Context - Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF) and the use of it in the Archives Portal Europe can be found in the apeEAC-CPF section of this Wiki and the schema for the apeEAC-CPF subset is available over here: http://www.archivesportaleurope.net/Portal/profiles/apeEAC-CPF.xsd.

Content providers, who don't have EAC-CPF files or can't export these kind of files from their own systems, can create EAC-CPF files in the Dashboard using a form. The form does not however cover all possible elements of apeEAC-CPF, but allows entering the key information about an entity. The created files are then available in the content manager, like the other files, in the EAC-CPF view of the Content manager screen.

The apeEAC-CPF form is available via de link in the Dashboard:

link to the EAC-CPF creation form in the Dashboard

The form is then displayed using the full width of your screen, first you have to select the type of entity that you want to describe:

create an EAC-CPF record step 1: choose the type of entity (person, corporate body or family

Next you can fill in the different tabs adapted to each entity type:

create an EAC-CPF record step2: fill in the form with all available information for describing the entity

The quality of the search in the portal and the facets to refine the search depend on the quality of the data available in the EAC-CPF file:

search results from EAC-CPF files with search term "Charles"

The display of EAC-CPF files in the Archives Portal Europe facilitates links to original websites and authority files systems, but also to related archival material and related entities as available in the portal:

full display of an EAC-CPF file in the Archives Portal Europe

Manage topics

The topics populate the tag cloud displayed on the homepage of the portal, and are also available in a list via the main menu "TOPICS". They are used as facets in the search results.

Tag cloud on the Archives Portal Europe's homepage

The tag cloud only shows a part of the topics available and rotates these with each page refresh, but the main menu option "TOPICS" gives access to all topics i.e. tags of the tag cloud:

main menu option "TOPICS" of the Archives Portal Europe

There are two ways to activate the topics in the Archives Portal Europe:

• Either rely on the existing indexes of your files (subelement <subject> of the element <controlaccess>, at any level of description), that will be automatically taken into account once you have mapped them in the Dashboard. Please note that if your files are already published in the Dashboard, you will need to unpublish-republish them.
• Either create a specific source guide on a topic and connect this source guide to this specific topic; in this case, topics will be connected only at the high level of a description (<archdesc>), so applied to the whole finding aid, therefore, it is recommended to only use this way of connecting topics to thematic finding aids, so not to general ones which might have a few descriptions related to the topcis, because that would pollute the search results for that topic.

Note: connecting a source guide to a topic is described in more detail in the FAQ How to use topics in this Wiki.

The "topic description" contains the original (English) term that is displayed in portal and that you can translate in the project "topics" of Archives Portal Europe Translation Tool.

The "keyword for controlaccess" is the place to map your own terms with the topics of the portal. In the example above, the topic First World War (1914 -1918) is mapped to the terms "Première guerre mondiale" and "Grande Guerre", terms that are used in the finding aids.

The "source guide" column is automatically filled in with the source guide linked to one (or more) topic.

You can order the column, modify or delete an existing topic or create a new topic mapping.

You have two dropdown lists at the top:

• The first one allows you to select the topic from the existing list–that can be changed only by a general administrator, if requested so by the team.
• The second one allows you to link a topic to the existing source guides (either already existing in your websites and uploaded in the portal, or created on purpose to take advantage of the topics functionality of the portal.

The terms are case insensitive: "Taxation" or "taxation" will be index equally.

The limitation of characters is set to 1000. It allows entering a lot of synonyms in the case of very general topics that do corresponds to numerous specific terms.

Please note that it takes around 10 to 15 minutes before "your" topics are taken into account in the tag cloud

To help you map the topics with your existing index entries or thesaurus, a new functionality has been developed in the Data Preparation Tool. You can list all <subject> element of all your files in one go, and see which are the most relevant and important and could be mapped to the existing list of topics of the portal.