Release 1.2 of the Archives Portal Europe – new features and improvements
Step by step: improvements since release 1.1 in January 2013
Between January 2013 and today, there have been two intermediate releases (in summer and autumn 2013) adding step by step to the functionalities of the Archives Portal Europe. The first of these releases in June concentrated on improving workflows and actions in the back-end of the portal such as creating and editing information on the archival institutions and preparing the conversion to the Europeana Data Model (EDM) in order to deliver data to Europeana (www.europeana.eu). The second release in October brought various improvements and new functionalities to the front-end.
"Featured Documents" and new design
Along with a new design featuring a new header for the Archives Portal Europe and some alignment in terms of style and clearer lines, this release introduced a new section to the Archives Portal Europe: in “Featured Documents”, content providers present the most interesting examples from their collections in a prominent place on the portal. All these documents are digitised, zoomable and feature a description with some background information on the document itself.
All content made findable via search engines
Further improvements to the Directory section displaying information on the archival institutions include a complete list of the archival material – all the finding aids and/or holding guides – uploaded by an institution and available on the Archives Portal Europe. This also permits external search engines such as Google, Bing etc to find and link to all the content published in the portal.
Make the Archives Portal Europe your portal – “My pages” section
With the release 1.2, the Archives Portal Europe will provide registered users with some additional functionalities within a new section called “My pages”. For now, the main functionality offered will be an option to save and retrieve searches that have been conducted at a certain point. You can save a search with all parameters such as the search terms, advanced search options and refinements that had been applied to the search results. The functionalities of this section will be extended in the releases to come to facilitate more research orientated and interactive use of the content of the Archives Portal Europe.
Contact us more easily
If you have any suggestions or comments about a document, you can now send us this feedback more easily. Each document’s display features a contact form especially designed for this purpose. The form requires a contact email that will be automatically filled for registered users who are logged into the website.
Mapping the Directory
The Directory – which provides information about the archival institutions currently represented by 26 countries from of the Archives Portal Europe network – now features an enhanced map to locate each institution. The map indicates certain clusters of institutions eg per country or region, which will adapt when zooming in and out of the map. You can zoom in to street level of one specific institution and you can access more detailed information about this institution in the archival landscape structure below the map.
Further improvements in the back-end
Redesigned Archival Landscape
The back-end of the Archives Portal Europe – the dashboard where all content providers hold their private accounts – has also been improved. The Country Managers now have the possibility to manage the structure of their institutions in a more efficient way following the re-design of the section to edit the Archival Landscape.
Re-starting information-sharing with Europeana
With one of the main objectives of the Archives Portal Europe being to share information with Europeana, there have been further improvements of the conversion process towards EDM. These adaptations are based on feedback received by the project partners of the Archives Portal Europe network as well as by the Europeana team. In this context it is now possible to influence the extent and detail of the conversion result in a more direct way.
Managing the data upload
Starting with release 1.2, it will be possible for the content providers to automate the upload as well as the actions done to the data after upload in order to work more efficiently within the Archives Portal Europe. The creation of so-called dashboard profiles enables for example, the specification of whether uploaded content can always directly be published to the Archives Portal Europe or even to Europeana, so that no intermediate steps are necessary.
Data Preparation Tool version 1.5
In connection with each new version of the Archives Portal Europe, a new version of the Data Preparation Tool (DPT) is made available. This tool provides the important steps of data processing in the form of a desktop application and can be downloaded via our project website (see version 1.5 of the DPT). This latest version will provide similar improvements to the ones mentioned above for the back-end of the Archives Portal Europe with regard to the creation of information on the archival institutions, the conversion of archival data to EDM and further enhancements for the preparation of local data to be ingested into the Archives Portal Europe.
Curious? Log on to the Archives Portal Europe at http://www.archivesportaleurope.net/ and let us know what you think of it! You are invited to complete our user survey presented on the homepage where your feedback is warmly welcomed. We will keep working on improving the portal for you and keep you in the loop on our further progress.
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