Concept Archives Portal Europe

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.

three layer model

Here is how we connect all the standards we use into the three layer model which is the basis of the Archives Portal Europe framework:

We use EAD to come up with an Archival Landscape, hierarchically giving access to all contributing countries and institutions, as well as to their Holding Guides, Sources Guides and Finding Aids. These EAD documents contain our most important metadata.

For information on the archival institutions we use the EAG standard

For the description of record creators, we use the EAC-CPF standard and we also give access to this information on the level of the Holdings Guides, the Source Guides and the Finding Aids.

To link descriptions of archival material to digital archival objects, the EAD element <dao/> can be used as well as the METS standard.

And of course we will be able to forward all information on digital archival objects to Europeana by extracting all relevant context information on digital archival objects (if they are available) from the Finding Aids and convert this information, including the link to the digital archival object, to the Europeana Data Model format (EDM).

Some explanation:

• a Holdings Guide might be a simple sum-up of all Finding Aids of an archival institution, so in fact a simple Finding Aid that presents all material held in an archival institution, with or without reference to the individual Finding Aids.

• a Source Guide or Thematic Guide is a specific Finding Aid that in which all archival descriptions on a specific theme or topic are gathered, independent of the location where that specific archival material is stored.

• a Finding Aid is a description of the content of one archival fonds or collection, held by an archival institution.