Eddy Put: What's in a Title? — Aboutness versus Intellectual Form in Archival Description
Abstract
The special relationship between form and content, its archival representation and the way researchers deal with the opacity of archival material are known archival cruxes. Archivists are confronted with the limits of accessibility when they describe items in a purely formal way (accounts, sentence registers, notarial deeds, etc). The emergence of an online research context has made this problem even more pressing. Sophisticated finding aids and powerful search engines very often create the highly deceptive illusion that researchers can have the content of millions of sources immediately at their fingertips. But archivists do not always succeed in bridging the gap between their formal descriptions and the content–based questions of researchers. The following text discusses the challenge and possible approaches of creating archival descriptions in the era of search engines and databases, especially for early modern serial archives.
Angelika Menne-Haritz: Cross-border Discoveries in the Archives Portal Europe
Abstract
The Archives Portal Europe allows us to make new discoveries without knowing what the end result will be. Users often are surprised about what they find out. Their researches need a lot of work, new ideas and imagination. The following article describes three examples of cross-border researches. They concern aspects of European history that involved several countries in Europe. Therefore, there should be material on them in more than one archival institution. Even if the portal is only at the beginning of bringing this information together, the advantages of cross-border researches are already visible.
This paper was presented by Angelika Menne-Haritz, APEx Scientific Coordinator, at the 29th EBNA-Meeting, Athens, June 5th 2014.
Guinevere Barlow, Laura Gould: Small Scale, Big Change - the Impact of Social Media
Abstract
With increasing numbers of platforms, each with promoters and detractors alike, social media has presented an opportunity for heritage organisations and projects to engage with audiences in new ways. Faced with limited resources, the question of time input versus return is critical, not to mention issues such as getting to grips with technology, audience requirements and social media etiquette.
Operating within the University of Edinburgh's Centre for Research Collections (CRC), Lothian Health Services Archive (LHSA) and the Carmichael Watson Project (CWP) are both inscribed to the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register (LHSA’s Edinburgh and Lothian HIV/AIDS Collection was added in 2011 and the Carmichael Watson Collection in 2014). Both LHSA and CWP have adopted a number of social media platforms as part of promotion and engagement strategies. These small steps have had a disproportionately large impact, and resulted in changed working practices at both the organisational and individual level.
This paper was co-presented by the two authors in June 2013.
Aranzazu Lafuente Urién: Archival authority control: an introduction to Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families (EAC-CPF)
Abstract:
The Archival theory and practice have always recognized the importance of the context of the production of documents. The ISAAR (CPF) and EAC-CPF are standards whose primary aims are the formalisation of the name of the creator as the primary key for the international exchange. How has the process of archival authorities developed? How have these standards evolved until today? What are the relationships between archival authority control and librarian authority control? How they match together, what are their differences, which elements are the same, how do they converge today? This text has tried to analyze and explain the process of the development of the concept and practice of control of archival authorities, which has been developed in the past 25 years, in parallel with the process and evolution of standards and conceptual models of libraries. It explains this evolution chronologically to the current state of standards today, especially to the Encoded Archival context for corporate bodies, Persons and families - EAC-CPF.
Kuldar Aas: So, there is data – what can we do with it? - (Re)using data on Archives Portal Europe
Abstract:
At the moment of writing (May 2014) the Archives Portal Europe includes data from 397 archival institutions, in total more than 38 million descriptive units which reference to more than 141 million digital objects. By the end of the Archives Portal Europe network of excellence (APEx) project in 2015 the amount of institutions and data is expected to grow even more and therefore the portal will include a huge set of data which has much potential for reuse.
However, this potential has not yet been exploited much as the main scope in the APEx project, and also in the previous Archives Portal Europe network (APEnet) project, has been the development of the tools for data gathering, normalisation and simple presentation.
This article is trying to give an overview of the first emerging solutions for more effective data reuse and research as well as to discuss further possibilities which reach beyond the lifetime of the APEx project.
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