Let´s set sail together and join the APE network!
The Archives Portal Europe is YOUR opportunity to showcase your digital content to a vast European audience and it's absolutely free to join!
Let us tell you WHY you should come on board:
Presenting your content on the Archives Portal Europe will offer your institution a new publication and aggregation platform and allow you to reach new users using the cross-border and cross-domain search facilities of the portal and Europeana (the biggest cultural heritage portal in Europe). Participating in this pan-European initiative will not only make your institution and collections better known throughout the continent but will also generate more traffic to your website, collections and reading room. The Archives Portal Europe only holds your data, not the digital objects themselves, and provides access to your digital objects by redirecting users to your own website. Potential benefits could therefore include more funding as a result of higher visitor numbers and increased revenue through the sale of online products (eg high resolution scans of your holdings). In addition, participating in the Archives Portal Europe as a content provider will help you to standardise the way in which you provide access to your online material. This will be of assistance when contributing to the Archives Portal Europe and to Europeana and will also encourage making content available in a standardised way to other portal initiatives or services in which your institution may currently participate.
Why miss this opportunity? Join now!
Let us show you HOW you can join and be part of the crew:
Your first point of contact is your national Country Manager ie the national archives and their administrations that are current APEx project partners. They will provide you with information and support to get started. A list of all current Country Managers and their contact details can be found here.
Is your country not yet represented within the group of project partners? Then please contact the APEx project office directly - click here.
Together with your Country Manager, you will decide on the framework for your contribution to the Archives Portal Europe. This will correspond as far as possible with your institution’s requirements and can include collaboration with a national archives portal or a national Europeana aggregator in your country. Your participation will then be formalised by signing the Content Provider Agreement of the Archives Portal Europe.
The Archives Portal Europe is based on a set of international archival and technical standards that have been defined specifically for their use in this joint research platform. In the Archives Portal Europe, participants are not required to submit digital objects (eg scanned image files) but instead, data usually in the form of XML files (including a link, where appropriate, to digital objects on your website). Collaboration will begin with a short questionnaire to enable the project team to support your data submission through knowledge of your technical requirements (data management, structures and formats etc).
The conversion of your data into the common formats defined for the Archives Portal Europe will be prepared in close cooperation between you and the project team with you approving the results of the data conversion process. It is possible to test the data yourself using the Data Preparation Tool developed and provided by the APEx project.
Following the project’s principle of decentralised responsibility, you will manage the publication workflow (new content, updates, data deletion etc) once this is put in place. Apart from the technical steps for preparing your data, you will therefore have your own personal account and access to the back-end of the Archives Portal Europe, the dashboard. Access to the latter will be provided by your country manager who will also support you in your initial use of the dashboard, if necessary. Your country manager can also assist with getting an account for the “Content Checker”, a test environment which offers the possibility to familiarise yourself with the processes before providing your content in the public system. As links within the portal’s archival content (source guides, holdings guides, finding aids etc) already lead to enlarged digitised objects on the participants’ own websites, the provision of images to the portal is not required.
PDF version of "How to join"-steps available for download here.
A version in Greek is available here.
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