Ana María López Cuadrado: Working on European archival information system linking encoded data — the Census-Guide to Archives and EAG, a common history
Census-Guide for Spanish and Latin American Archives was born in the 1980s, in the Archives Documentary Information Centre (CIDA), under the Ministry of Culture, with the objective of disseminating and controlling the Spanish documentary heritage. One decade later, the Latin American heritage was also included. Nowadays, Census-Guide is an archival information system that pursues a comprehensive standardisation of its data bases. Its work philosophy is based on cooperation with different archival institutions which want to enter their data in our system.
They may use any of the online possibilities we offer. The enormous amount of information that the Census-Guide harbours (over 50,000 records) is the reason why it is essential to establish the most appropriate standardisation of information policies, as well as keeping updated with the advances in technology and in other sciences. Thus, it may improve not only the speed and reliability of the information recovery to researchers, but also the usability of our systems for archivists. At this time, the results offered by Web 2.0 and the philosophy of re-using the information, besides the importance of standardisation of data to achieve these two exponents, make the Census-Guide focus its efforts on this point. This is exactly where we are currently working.
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