17 January 2013: the countdown is now over - the release 1.1 of the Archives Portal Europe marks an important step in developing this unique portal into an invaluable tool for the international archival community.
New project, new portal, new address: www.archivesportaleurope.net
As the network around the Archives Portal keeps growing steadily, this new release is the perfect occasion to officially introduce the portal's new web address: from now on it is available at www.archivesportaleurope.net! Take a closer look at our adjusted logo and header area on the site and you will notice the correlation between the design and our new address.
The continuous expansion of the network can be experienced vividly and directly on the portal itself as we regularly add new data. For example, just recently the Icelandic National Archives provided data to the portal which now also features data from new regional and local archives in eg the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal. Your research possibilities and perimeters just keep growing!
CMS: it's all in the foundation
With the release of the Archives Portal Europe 1.1, the portal's infrastructure has now been moved to a CMS (Content Management System)-based environment that enables the archival material available at the portal to be presented in more serviceable and practical ways and will feature previews of the developments to be realised in the future.
User interface and dashboard: the two basic elements to the portal's entity
Not only will you notice some exciting enhancements to the portal's user interface with regard to the design and colour scheme which will make your use of the portal even more efficient and fun, there are also more languages available for the portal's interface thanks to translation efforts made by our partners. With regard to the functionalities, an exact date search has been added and it's now easier to reset your search when needed. In addition to these adjustments, the back-end of the Archives Portal Europe – the dashboard where all content providers hold their private accounts – has been improved: the processing of data preparation and publication is now much easier and more convenient.
The Data Preparation Tool: amping up data processing
Following the release 1.1 of the Archives Portal Europe, a new version of the Data Preparation Tool (DPT) which provides the important steps of data processing in the form of a desktop application, will be made available via our project website (look out for version 1.2 of the DPT). Besides being able to easily convert and validate local data to apeEAD (Encoded Archival Description as used in the Archives Portal Europe) or create information files on the archival institutions encoded in EAG (Encoded Archival Guide), the DPT now also includes a first version of conversion from apeEAD to EDM (Europeana Data Model) for providing EDM-compliant data to Europeana via the Archives Portal Europe.
Curious yet? Well then, log on to the Archives Portal Europe at www.archivesportaleurope.net and let us know what you think of it! We will keep working on improving the portal for you and keep you in the loop on our further progress.
All the best,
the APEx team
