Introduction

The Archives Portal Europe has a 'tag cloud' with themes or topics on its homepage to enable end-users to access specific content on these topics very quickly. It is possible to connect finding aids to these topics.

How to make use of topics, figure 1

The workflow

The Content Checker, our demo environment, doesn't have any topics yet, so let's create one and attach finding aids to it.

How to make use of topics, figure 2

Creating a Source Guide

For connecting finding aids to topics you need to have a Source Guide which already links to finding aids on that specific topic. You can create a Source Guide in the Archives Portal Europe's Dashboard and it is the same functionality which also enables you to create a Holdings Guide.
This instruction video shows how to create a Holdings Guide, so use that same principle when clicking on the "Creation of a Source guide"-link in the "Source guide"-view of the Content manager screen of the Dashboard:

How to make use of topics, figure 3

You can connect finding aids multiple times to Holdings Guides and Source Guides, the amount of connections is visible in the column "Holdings guide" of the Content manager screen of the Dashboard. For this demo we have connected a bunch of finding aids describing collections of maps and drawings to a Source Guide about maps and drawings.

How to make use of topics, figure 4

Via the option "Search" in the Portal you can expand the Archival Landscape tree to the level of the institution with which we demo, the Nationaal Archief, and you can see that there are Holdings Guides and Source Guides available.
The in the Content manager screen selected finding aids describing collections of maps and drawings are connected to level "4. Collections of maps and drawings" of the Holdings Guide as well as to the Source Guide, so hence they are listed in the Content manager screen as connected twice.

How to make use of topics, figure 5

Creating a Topic mapping

Now we have to start creating a mapping to one of the already existing topics in the Portal, in our case: "Maps". These topics have been created at Admin level in the Dashboard, aligned with the UK Archival Thesaurus (UKAT). In case you want to connect finding aids to a topic which does not yet exists in the Dashboard, contact your Country Manager, or the APEF technical team.